In this nightmare, I am in an exam hall in southern Poland competing with professional speed-writers working in 11 different languages. We are three and a half minutes into a verbatim report of a 15-minute speech, read at an accelerating pace, about the UN World Population Plan of Action, and my shaky shorthand is starting to fall apart.
This is no bad dream, however. It is the “speech capturing” competition of the 54th congress of Intersteno, a non-profit that organises a biennial Olympiad of speed-writing. I am in Katowice to try out the note-taking skills I learnt as a trainee journalist against the world’s finest. It is the first official test of my speed since I passed my journalism exams in 1987 at 100 words per minute.
The contest takes place on the same day England are set to meet Spain in the final of the men’s Euros. “Is shorthand coming home?” one of the friends who trained as a journalist jokes on our Class of 87 WhatsApp group. Downing my pen with more than 10 minutes to go, I know it is not.
Shorthand, which uses symbols to make it easier to record speech accurately and at speed for later transcription, was once the future. A workplace technology that was considered as potentially revolutionary in the late 19th century as email and the internet in the late 20th, or generative AI in the 21st. Its roots stretched back to the first century BC, when Tiro, slave and secretary to Cicero, developed a way to record his master’s oratory in the Roman senate. Sixteenth-century sages developed their own English-language systems with science-y names — characterie, stenography, tachygraphy, brachygraphy, zeiglographia — used by the likes of Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson.
In the 1830s, Charles Dickens learnt shorthand to become a parliamentary reporter, an experience he lent to his character David Copperfield. In the eponymous novel, David’s efforts to master the craft drive him “to the confines of distraction”. But, fuelled by his love for Dora Spenlow, the young reporter persists and, ultimately, is able to boast that he has “tamed [the] stenographic mystery”. Having proved his determination and self-discipline, he wins Dora’s hand.
Towards the end of that century, the first international gathering of what later became Intersteno convened in the Geological Museum on London’s Jermyn Street. Four hundred evangelists for shorthand heard Archibald Primrose, fifth Earl of Rosebery, open proceedings. Rosebery, who went on to become prime minister, confessed he was entirely ignorant about the practice of shorthand, but forecast “an almost unlimited future” for the technique, because it would answer “the main tendency of this age . . . towards the economy of time and of strength”. “I hope with all my heart that shorthand will penetrate every cranny and crevice of our civilised life,” he concluded, to cheers. We know this because the many lengthy speeches at the event were recorded, verbatim, in shorthand.
Advocates for shorthand went far beyond claims for improved productivity. The London congress also celebrated the golden jubilee of Isaac Pitman’s system, forerunner of the version I deployed in Katowice. Writing in the middle of the 19th century, Pitman (motto: “Time saved is life gained”) claimed the widespread adoption of shorthand had achieved “the diffusion of knowledge among the middle classes of society” and set his sights on extending what he called “phonography” to the lower classes. His ambition was partly realised as shorthand and typing exploded as entry-level skills for clerks and secretaries in the early 20th century.
By the time of Sylvia’s Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar, the central character Esther Greenwood was objecting — as Plath had — to learning shorthand. “My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major with shorthand was something else again. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter,” Esther says. “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.”
As a teenager in the 1960s, Sylvia Bennett also had higher goals. She wanted to become a history teacher, but was deterred by her mother who “turned round and said, you can’t do that: we can only get married and have babies”. Instead, Bennett went to Pitman’s College, a chain of training centres, and learnt book-keeping and shorthand, which, by the late 1980s, she was teaching to me and other trainee reporters.
At the time, 100wpm was a rigid requirement for a qualification in “practical journalism” offered by the National Council for the Training of Journalists. Most regional newspaper trainees on my course were on probation. “You had to put your head down, knuckle down for five months and get it done,” says Bennett. “You needed to get your job at the end of it.”
I still use Pitman as my primary note-taking tool, switching to recording — with shorthand as a back-up — only for feature-length interviews. Research has shown that writing down and reviewing material helps the note-taker process and recall information. But voice recognition apps, transcription software and generative AI are improving. In a process that mirrors the digitisation that has shaken up print newspapers, I can foresee a point when it will become so easy to convert speech to text automatically and summarise key points that no reporter will bother to devote long hours to learning usable shorthand.
That moment may already have arrived. Bennett says trainees now “don’t seem to be willing to put the effort in. They can see quicker ways of doing it.” The NCTJ stopped making shorthand mandatory for trainee journalists in 2016.
“Everything of value and quality is future-proof,” declared Rian Schwarz-van Poppel, president of Intersteno, opening the Katowice congress last month. Since it was revived in 1954, Intersteno itself has moved with the times. It has adopted and advocated for any technology that makes the conversion of speech to text easier, faster and more accurate.
Most Intersteno competitors were fleet-fingered word-processors, swift Stenotype-jockeys and captioners on their piano-like chord-writing machines, or even young texters, for whom there was a special contest. In Intersteno’s Olympics-like opening ceremony, veterans of many congresses paraded the national flags of their countries. A group called the Feel Harmonic Singers sang the Intersteno anthem (“From pencils and papers, to fingers and keys, / To voices and screens and fast minds and machines. / Writing and editing, fingers that fly, / Capturing speech before words can fly by. / Intersteno, Intersteno” etc). Prizes were presented to some tiny Turkish typists who had dominated an earlier youth competition.
If Intersteno’s social side was jolly, the competitions were deadly serious. Its high-ups have spent years working out how to level the playing field for writers working in different languages, with different syllable counts. The Slovaks, Hungarians and Czechs flew national pennants on their desks; the Turks wore team T-shirts.
Pen shorthand-writers were in a minority, and we were mostly of a certain age. Some of us still use our shorthand for work, such as Erika Vicai, a softly spoken 52-year-old who works in the Hungarian parliament, where shorthand is still the main means of capturing proceedings. (Shorthand died out as the primary technique in the British parliament in the 2000s.)
Vicai was first talent-spotted by a teacher who had seen the promising way her pupil held a pencil and gave her extra shorthand homework. She has vied with her compatriot and former parliamentary colleague Zsuzsánna Ferenc for the top spot in the speed competition for years. One or other has medalled at every Intersteno congress since 2009, with Ferenc triumphing in the last gathering in 2022 in Maastricht, and Vicai taking silver. Both regularly record a paper-scorching 400 syllables a minute, roughly 300 English words. Both have hit competition speeds of 460.
Through an interpreter, I asked Vicai about her motivation. She said practice and competition helped her train her muscle memory: “Practising is important just like for a runner who has to warm up, so that the memory should be kinetic, not only in the head but in the body.” Her contest pace is about twice as fast as she would need to cover any parliamentary session. When I asked whether there was any real rivalry between her and Ferenc, she frowned. It would be a distraction: “If we focused on that, we would fail.”
When I put down my pen in defeat that Sunday, Vicai and Ferenc were still scribbling and so, it seemed, were most of the pen-shorthand writers in the competition. In the background, as I started laboriously trying to interpret the squiggles and dots of my notes, I could hear the sound of dozens of machine-writers pouring the speech into their keyboards, like a soft but intense rainfall.
To make the leaderboard at all, I needed to transcribe at least three minutes of the speech, with a minimum number of errors, a result recorded as C3. Anyone with the skill and stamina to transcribe a near-flawless 15 minutes, including the final seconds when the speaker was gabbling like a fast-forwarded cartoon character, would score A15. Having abandoned the dream of a podium finish, C3 was my new gold.
When the results came out a couple of days later, Vicai had taken gold at A13 and 415 syllables a minute, beating Ferenc into second. There seemed to be hope for written shorthand, at least outside the Anglosphere. Four Hungarians, four Germans, two Austrians and a Finn qualified. And one Brit. Twelfth out of 13 competitors, I had clung on to hit C4, one minute longer than I had dared to hope. I had taken my notes at less than half Vicai’s winning speed, but still faster than my 100wpm NCTJ exam performance in the late 1980s.
England were soundly beaten by Spain in the football later that day, but I have taken away some patriotic positives from my own performance. Pitman 2000 still lives, at least in my notebook. I put the UK back on the pen-shorthand honours board for the first time since 2011.
Intersteno is debating whether to stage its next congress in Liverpool. I might yet get a chance to record a new PB on home ground in 2026. Well over a century after hundreds of enthusiasts gathered in London to celebrate phonography as a vehicle for peace, prosperity and productivity, shorthand could be coming home after all.
Andrew Hill is the FT’s senior business writer
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