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The Silent Judge
14 March 2012 11:32 amFinally managed to reach the end of my first piece of 'real' shorthand -- the story "The Silent Judge" by Maxwell Crooks in the 'advanced' style, i.e. the level of abbreviation one would be expected to read and use at a commercial level.
My goodness, it was a struggle to get started -- at this level it's so heavily context-dependent that if you get up and take your eye off the page for a few minutes you can find yourself totally lost when trying to find your place again. Often the only way to deduce a word from the handful of consonants provided is to read on to the end of the sentence and guess it from what follows; and woe between the novice who encounters a conundrum at the end of a sentence! I think I did get almost all of it in the end, although there may have been a few words that I skipped and never did come back to.
But it is extremely heavy going at the start, not least because it is incredibly boring -- reading late at night, I fell asleep over it on a daily basis. Having reached the end of the story I now realise that the opening tedium is almost certainly deliberate (the first hint of awareness coming when the authorial voice comments in an aside that the narrator is apparently completely unable to come to the point). In fact the situation in which Stone finds himself after the long-awaited revelation is one that I could genuinely feel for, and the teasing suggestion in the final page is an effective one: is the Judge really oblivious or is he very wise?
What is really needed in shorthand practice of course is repetition: I got very good at recognising the word 'skeleton' (although not 'cupboard', which generally accompanied it!) but really struggled to identify any words which didn't immediately logically follow what had gone before. Out of context and sans vowel-signs it is very easy to read 'aloud' as 'lied' or 'monotonous' as 'maintenance' or just to be completely stumped by them...
Anyway, I did it; quite an achievement given that I'm not actually supposed to know the Advanced style yet. Sadly I've run out of easier reading material which is what I really need -- to enable me to recognise at sight other outlines as common as 'at last' or 'almost' or 'still' and to be able to write them without having to work every last letter out....
My goodness, it was a struggle to get started -- at this level it's so heavily context-dependent that if you get up and take your eye off the page for a few minutes you can find yourself totally lost when trying to find your place again. Often the only way to deduce a word from the handful of consonants provided is to read on to the end of the sentence and guess it from what follows; and woe between the novice who encounters a conundrum at the end of a sentence! I think I did get almost all of it in the end, although there may have been a few words that I skipped and never did come back to.
But it is extremely heavy going at the start, not least because it is incredibly boring -- reading late at night, I fell asleep over it on a daily basis. Having reached the end of the story I now realise that the opening tedium is almost certainly deliberate (the first hint of awareness coming when the authorial voice comments in an aside that the narrator is apparently completely unable to come to the point). In fact the situation in which Stone finds himself after the long-awaited revelation is one that I could genuinely feel for, and the teasing suggestion in the final page is an effective one: is the Judge really oblivious or is he very wise?
What is really needed in shorthand practice of course is repetition: I got very good at recognising the word 'skeleton' (although not 'cupboard', which generally accompanied it!) but really struggled to identify any words which didn't immediately logically follow what had gone before. Out of context and sans vowel-signs it is very easy to read 'aloud' as 'lied' or 'monotonous' as 'maintenance' or just to be completely stumped by them...
Anyway, I did it; quite an achievement given that I'm not actually supposed to know the Advanced style yet. Sadly I've run out of easier reading material which is what I really need -- to enable me to recognise at sight other outlines as common as 'at last' or 'almost' or 'still' and to be able to write them without having to work every last letter out....