Intro

Part of Theory Development

A theory is the set of rules that govern a steno system. These rules are what you hold in your head, and eventually internalize, when you're writing with one of these systems.

These systems are quite large and quite sophisticated, so there are really a lot of decision points that will give you something with massively different characteristics. Some theories are easier to learn but are slower to write. Theories can be phonetic or orthographic, or some mix in between. Theories can use different layouts to fit the same sounds or spellings in different places! And even using the same sounds, theories can find different ways to utilize them. One of the more interesting decision points of a theory, I think, is not in the theory itself, but how it gets turned from something in your head to something you can actually use.

Creating a steno theory is a fundamentally difficult problem. You have to fit the entirety of English into around 22 keys, which gives you about 4 million combinations. That should be more than enough, but in reality, it doesn't leave you a lot of room to simplify things. And English wasn't simple to begin with, was it?

In the olden days, we wrote shorthand with a pen while people were talking, and had to later translate that shorthand into something readable by literally anyone other than the person who wrote it. We eventually ported this to computer, but kept this same step of translation after you write. A live TV captioner has to write words for other people to read at the same time as they're being spoken. If I had to translate my prose into english with a regular keyboard, well then steno would just be a waste of my time. You need to be able to translate words, live, as they're being written.

All the fuzziness we used to rely on is now gone. If your theory is based on sound, and two words sound the same but are spelled different, how do you handle that?

If your theory is based on how the word is spelled, you run into another problem. You don't want to memorize hundreds of thousands of words. But if you need to be able to write "car" and "bot", you need every combination of c or b, a or o, and r or t. That includes things like "cor" and "bor", which aren't words you'd ever need to type. This gets exponentially worse as you add more letters, until most of the combinations in your system map to nonsensical words like "shrougle" or "cherck". There just isn't enough room in 22 keys to fit millions of words like this. You'd need more keys, and you'd need to split words into multiple segments to fit everything.

This transition has left us trying to map our old ways of thinking, when we did shorthand with pens, onto our theories today. This set of pages is basically posing an alternative.