The Skill That Disappeared: Why No One Writes in Shorthand
Before technology put a computer in your pocket, information was harder to come by. Secretaries, stenographers, journalists, court reporters, and many other professionals struggled with the gap between the information they needed to share and the information they could retain at a time. Thus, the ability to write in shorthand became an invaluable professional skill, one that served as a basic qualification for many jobs.
However, shorthand has disappeared nearly entirely from workplaces today. Its decline demonstrates that a skill’s value can change over time, and those who once treated shorthand as a sign of professionalism, hard work, and employability now treat it as essentially irrelevant. To understand what changed, and what stands to be lost as a result of that transition, it’s helpful to see where shorthand started in the modern day.
Why and Where Shorthand Used to Be Commonplace
Before modern technology, shorthand was valuable because business communication depended largely on dictation. Managers, doctors, lawyers, executives, and others would frequently speak to their subordinates to relay messages or leave memos, and the individual would need to record this information in shorthand to capture it all quickly. Otherwise, the business professional might as well have written it for themselves.
As a result, shorthand became an ability that helped prospective employees in these fields stand out. It was especially important for women entering the workforce as stenographers and secretaries. Secretarial schools taught shorthand alongside related skills such as bookkeeping and typing. Shorthand was also important for journalists, who needed to take interviews and speeches without misrepresenting recreating what was said later.
Why Shorthand Has Nearly Disappeared
While you may still find people using shorthand if you look hard enough, you’ll likely notice it’s all but a dead skill. The workflows that made shorthand necessary have disappeared. Tape recorders and dictation machines allowed professionals to record their memos for later transcription, and word processors became effective for copying dictation as long as the person could type fast enough. Thus, typing became the new “hot” skill, especially as word processors began to allow for editing text later.
Nowadays, technology has advanced to include speech-to-text tools, AI transcription, and more, all of which have overtaken what shorthand once accomplished. While it’s true that court stenographers and live captioning still require some of these skills, they are more often performed on stenotype machines built for this purpose. In this way, technology completely redefined which human skills had value, at least of the business kind.
However, it couldn’t take away the intangible value that shorthand offered. Skilled shorthand writers were fast, but they also cultivated the ability to listen with intent, distinguish important details, and get to the heart of the matter near-instantly. There was also a cultural loss when the last generation of shorthand writers retired. Shorthand had long been part of the identity of secretarial and stenographic work, and severing that connection fractured some of the relationships in that field, too. People were not forming as many personal connections while learning shorthand because there were no secretarial schools that taught it.
Is Shorthand Still Worth Learning?
For most people, shorthand is not a skill that will help you get hired. That does not, however, mean that it is not worthwhile or that you’re wasting your time if you try. Shorthand writing can be a hobby in itself; some people enjoy the thrill of quick transcription under pressure and consider it a form of art not unlike flash fiction or speed sketching. Others want to cultivate the same abilities that shorthand writers had in years past: astute listening skills, the ability to pay attention for extended periods, and fine motor control.
Additionally, even though shorthand isn’t used now, it was used extensively in the past. If you want to understand old notebooks or records written in shorthand, you’ll need to know how to read them! In the end, shorthand succumbed to the technological revolution, and while that removed its value in the workplace, it did not diminish its inherent importance as a skill or its role in historical documents that remain useful today. It is a reminder that skills have histories, and that humans are capable of impressive tasks that never lose their meaning, even if they are no longer essential
