7 reasons why you need shorthand. Your boss saying they had to get it so you must isn’t one of them
Kim Fletcher, Chairman of the National Council for the Training of Journalists, admits to being a shorthand devotee — but also points to many reasons why you’re better off with it than without it, even if pressing the record button on your iphone can feel easier…
Of course journalism students don’t want to learn shorthand. Why would they? It’s a warm room, dust motes are dancing in the sunshine and the voice of the teacher, the voice of the teacher…the…voice…is…very…soporific…
Yet in most classes there’s always one, the one who really seems to enjoy it. That was me at Cardiff, with a sharpened H2 pencil and 120 words per minute, which made me very proud — until I worked next to a news desk man on The Star in Sheffield, who said he had broken the 200 barrier as a parliamentary reporter. He was Pitman. We were Teeline, a young and golden generation with a new language that was never going to be as fast, but which was oh-so-much easier to learn.
You disagree? Nothing could be harder or more boring than Teeline? Then think of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, learning shorthand more than a century before Teeline arrived: “The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep…”
Oh my, this new generation has got it easy. And while we are walking down Memory Lane, did I tell you before about my colleague at The Daily Telegraph, the man who had perfected — and should have patented — his technique with a pencil stub? He could go pint for pint with a politician at the hotel bar, while taking a surreptitious note in his trouser pocket. Have we discussed the beautiful function of a Pentel propelling pencil, with a case of spare leads? Or the moment the former Labour MP George Galloway used my all-time favourite outline in praising the Iraqi tyrant president Saddam Hussain for his “courage, strength and indefatigability”? I know, I know, you are already forming that short form “ability” symbol in your head, aren’t you?
But enough reminiscences. Spare us folk who think if it was good enough for them, the next lot must do it too. The last thing we want to do is suggest shorthand is in any way old fashioned. It’s 2020. You’ve got a smart phone that records. You can buy a digital recorder for next to nothing. What’s the point of a pad and pencil?
Let’s do the quick version, for attention spans are shortening:
1. It’s practical. You leaf through your note and you can whack the quote out on Twitter in seconds. Try that with 10 minutes of recording to play back.
2. Courts accept shorthand notes as accurate records of conversations (I’ve often wondered about that, as I look through notes I have taken, but they do).
3. Courts don’t let you record. One day they might. Today they don’t. So how are you going to record what goes on?
4. Taking a shorthand note makes you concentrate. You must listen carefully. Listening carefully is good.
5. Pencils work in rain.
6. Learning shorthand suggests you are serious and committed, that you care about detail.
7. Editors like it. Indeed, they like it so much that many employ only those journalists who have it. Do you want to earn money from journalism or not?
But you get by without it? By all means, in many media roles. Lots of journalists do, though heaven knows what they doodle with in boring meetings. You can even get an NCTJ diploma without it (imagine the soul searching before we agreed that, five years ago), though don’t blame us if, somewhere along the career road, you discover something in your life is lacking. The thing is, if you want to stack the odds in your favour on those first rungs, you are better off mastering it.
And now, while you prod with a little less self-assurance at the red record button on your phone, I leave you with a line that, if the comedian Tim Vine hasn’t already used, he surely must: “My editor told me to learn shorthand. She said it would be character forming.”
Kim Fletcher, Chairman of the National Council for the Training of Journalists
