I’ve been writing a lot on my reMarkable Paper Pro since it arrived a week ago. I started to using shorthand to write faster, but I was spending too much time designing new shorthand forms. So today, I dug out my old Teeline shorthand textbook from my journalism days and started revising.
Fellow journos from Singapore Press Holdings should recognise these letters – back in the day, we had to attend the Teeline course and pass the written test. Some people hated the course and rarely used Teeline, but I loved it because I’m into visual and efficient methods of communication.
The problem with Teeline is that if you don’t use it regularly, after a while, you can’t understand the shorthand you wrote! The whole page looks like a collection of scratches. So the middle way is to write important facts and words in longhand, and everything else in shorthand.
Teeline is mostly a lost skill now. The Teeline textbook by Ann Dix is long out of print and it’s no longer a requirement for journos since AI-powered audio transcription is way more effective, and most people don’t use pen and paper. However, for us modern scribes using digital writing tablets, it’s a very useful skill to have.