When I was young my mum had an evening job, teaching secretarial skills at night school. In those day  s the skills of shorthand and typing were in de

Revisiting secretarial skills: Shorthand for a 21st century writer

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2021-06-14 15:30:03

When I was young my mum had an evening job, teaching secretarial skills at night school. In those day s the skills of shorthand and typing were in demand in the workplace. Most professionals (who were mostly male) would have a secretary (who would be female.) Men didn’t type their own letters, they would dictate them out loud for their secretary to type up. They would either dictate them onto a dictaphone, for an audio typist to type up, or their secretary would take down the words in shorthand to type up later. Word processors were primitive — if you needed several copies of a letter then it had to be typed several times by copy typists in the typing pool.

Nowadays most people can type at a reasonable speed, many women hold professional and managerial jobs, and most people type their own letters. In some professions (such as law) dictation is still used, but instead of having a secretary taking down your words in shorthand, and having to pay her, most firms use a service where you dictate audio onto your computer and it whizzes off to somewhere where labour is cheaper, such as the Indian subcontinent. The letter is typed up halfway across the world, and may be printed off and sent from anther location entirely. As voice recognition improves (Google Assistant can understand even my flat northern vowels) even this may become obsolete. So why am I re-learning shorthand?

I say re-learning because my mum did attempt to teach me as a girl. Shorthand was compulsory in the school she attended in the sixties, but wasn’t even an option at mine. Vocational courses for my peers centered on childcare and the hospitality industry, secretarial skills were already on the wane. My mum never expected me to become a secretary, I was always aiming for university. Probably I nagged her to teach me this strange writing which looked like a super secret spy code.

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