Stenoscript

Stenoscript or Stenoscript ABC Shorthand is a shorthand system invented by Manuel C. Avancena (1923-1987) and first published in 1950. Encyclopedia Britannica, perhaps erroneously, claims the system was published in London in 1607. An unrelated project also called Stenoscript was written by George A.S. Oliver and published in London in 1934.

History

According to a profile published in The News (the daily newspaper in Frederick, Maryland, 8 April 1968), Avencena was attending George Washington University and dropped out of a Gregg shorthand course to devote his time to developing a system that could be learned more quickly. After spending many hours in the Library of Congress studying stenography and word frequency statistics, he eventually self-published his first Stenoscript book and taught classes to promote his system.

Numerous revised editions of the book were published through 1989, a book of dictation drills appeared in 1972 and a dictionary was issued in 1989. A Spanish edition was published in 1967. The system was taught in a few high schools and colleges although it is difficult to determine how many. A few dissertations and theses compared the progress of Stensocript students to learners of other systems.

Writing

Stenoscript is written using traditional longhand cursive characters with a few variations and special symbols. Lower-case letters are used for phonetically spelling words. Upper-case letters serve as abbreviations for common prefixes and suffixes, for example F represents "-ful" or "-fully." Vowels are written when they occur at the beginning or end of a word, but vowels within words are omitted: "bank" becomes bq. (The letter q represents the -nk sound.) Instead of writing -ed or -d at the end of a word, Stenoscript indicates the past tense of a verb by underlining the final letter of the stem.

The author claimed that a student of his system could "attain a speed of 80 words a minute with comparatively little effort" and that speeds of 100 to 120 words per minute could be reached after intensive study and drilling.

Commentary

It is a phonetic system using longhand characters and punctuation. For this reason it has been criticised as not being a true shorthand system.

The system was intended to be a standardised form of abbreviation, requiring great mastery of recall. For example, ak stands for "acknowledge".

Although the system is generally slower to write in than more traditional shorthand styles such as Gregg or Pitman's shorthand, it has the distinct advantage of being decipherable to people not experienced in the system once applied in context.

For example

I ak . cl-n com-m

I acknowledge the client (s) comment