The letters you are now reading, while well adapted to the eye to be read, are so ill adapted to the hand to be written that schools teach longhand as an alternative to printing them. The more cursive longhand is easy to learn, but only about 10% faster than printing. Alternative handwriting systems offer 100% or better improvements in handwriting ease and speed. If you could spend the rest of your life taking notes or keeping a journal/diary while writing two or three times faster, then, gee, why not?

As a bonus for learning an alternative system, you can be almost certain that no one you know will be able to read anything you write, so you will have learned not only a fast but secret way to write. Learning an alternative to longhand can not only be fun and way cool, but practical as well.

Most alternative systems write words the way they sound, not the way they are spelled. English spelling is so quirky that winning a spelling bee is a major achievement, and even the champs falter at some point. While the Phoenicians may have needed only 26 symbols to represent their speech sounds, English has from 32 to 50 speech sounds depending on who's doing the counting, and using only 26 letters to represent them just doesn't cut it.

To make up for the missing symbols, several letters are often combined to represent a sound. This wouldn't be so bad if there was any consistency involved, but as all children and ESL students know there isn't, as English is only about 40% phonetic (which is to say 60% of common words have irregular spellings). For example the "sh" sound can be spelled 13 different ways: ocean, machine, special, pshaw, sure, schist, conscience, nauseous, she, tension, issue, mission, nation.

With vowels things are even worse (about 20 spellings per vowel sound!). The "oo" sound has 29 different spellings: rule, ruby, flue, troupe, fruit, through, maneuver, wooed, group, ooze, grew, rheumatism, move, bruise, canoe, two, moon, do, plus 11 other spellings found in less common words. On average, there are at least 13 different ways to spell each sound in frequently used Engish words. If all English words are counted, there are 28 different spellings for each sound, or over 1,100 ways to spell 40 sounds. No wonder even very good spellers have only about a 50/50 chance of correctly spelling a word that is new to them.

The way out of this madness is to write using a phonetic alphabet—one sound, one symbol. Because multiple letters are often used to indicate a single sound, the average English word has more letters than sounds. Writing phonetically requires learning more symbols initially, but requires fewer symbols per word, and so is faster. If each sound is represented by the simplest possible symbol (single stroke lines, loops and hooks), the number of strokes needed to write a word can be greatly reduced in comparison to longhand. This is how the alternative systems can be so much faster than looooooonghand, which uses several strokes per letter and often several letters per sound.

Pitman Shorthand

The better known alternative systems include the Pitman system, developed by Sir Isaac Pitman in 1837. It is based on geometrical curves and lines in varying lengths and angles written on lined paper. Lines are also written thin or thick using a special flexible fountain pen tip, though a pencil will work. Here's an example from The Joy of Pitman Shorthand.

The Pitman system is a complete phonetic alphabet, though diacritical marks have to be added alongside the lines to indicate vowels, which is awkward. When speed is important they are often omitted. But since it is possible to write each word that sounds different in a unique way, I consider Pitman's system to be a form of handwriting as well as shorthand. Shorthand is a system of abbreviation in which only a bare outline of a word is written—just enough (note the middle line above) to allow you to later decipher from the word's outline and its context what the word is. Shorthand systems go for maximum speed at the expense of readability. Shorthand systems can become readible once you learn to sight read all the outlines or "brief forms," which can number in the thousands, but just learning the basic symbol set won't cut it. The Pitman system is still used, especially in England. Do check it out. It is not easy to learn or become proficient in, but it is fast (up to 10X faster than longhand!), elegantly austere, and has been adapted for use in many languages other than English.