Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #14. Write Faster

Write smarter, not harder! The ASCII-based shorthand hack called Speedwords will not only enable you to write faster on paper without learning a special shorthand alphabet, but will also enable you to type faster in many word processors and text editors.

Dutton Speedwords is an artificial language [Hack #51] developed by Reginald Dutton in the early 1920s and improved over the following few decades. Dutton intended Speedwords both as an international auxiliary language like Esperanto, which could be written or spoken by people who did not speak the same native language, and as a shorthand system.

The advantage that Speedwords has over most other shorthand methods is that you do not need to learn a special alphabet to use it (as you would, for example, with the Gregg or Pitman shorthand methods). This feature not only makes Speedwords easy to learn, but also means that it can be typed, entered into PDAs with handwriting recognition systems, and generally used anywhere the Roman alphabet can be used. It's also great for quickly catching information [Hack #13].

In Action

This section contains a short Speedwords vocabulary, which should be enough to get you started.¹ The original Dutton Speedwords textbooks are long out of print, but there's plenty of material on the Web² if you want to go further.

One-letter Speedwords

If you just want to play around with Speedwords and give it a test drive, try learning the 27 single-character Speedwords in Table 2-1 and use them ...