WSI

The Ward Stone Ireland layout, or WSI (named after its creator), is the standard steno layout/system.

It's quite common for people new to steno to question the quality of WSI. It was created 115 years ago, surely it can't still be good today?

A few things to keep in mind:

  1. Don't reinvent something that you don't understand
  2. WSI is very much tried-and-tested, and there is absolutely no speed benefit to using anything else
  3. Designing a steno system is a ridiculously difficult thing to do (and it's something you should do after becoming familiar with WSI)

To answer a few of the questions I've seen floating around:

Why is the layout asymmetric?

Because English is asymmetric!

It's definitely possible to make a symmetric layout - I have in the past, and I've come to the conclusion that there is zero benefit in doing so. English is not a symmetric language, so it's rather silly to make a symmetric layout I think.

Why not IPA?

The goal of steno is to be able to listen to someone speak and transcribe that into English. The difficulty of this problem mostly comes down to English being a very inconsistent language.

With written shorthand, or "non-realtime shorthand", you can transcribe words exactly how they are said, and later, in a second step, translate those words into English. This was the job of a stenographer for a very long time, but it is not any longer.

Because the goal is to get to the English, we use a very loose system of writing words with a few phonemes and graphemes that we need in order to distinguish any word from any other while keeping the layout as small as possible.

Should I add more keys?

If you'd like (and your keyboard has 6 columns on the left hand), you can add a ^ and + from the Extended Stenotype layout - these keys are likely unused in your theory meaning you can use them for whatever you'd like :)

But beyond that, no. The reason there are so few keys is so they are all very close at all times. The layout is designed so that pressing any key won't require you to move your hand, or any of your other fingers. If you try to squeeze a 27th key on the layout, this will no longer be true.

With steno, we only need ~24 keys because we use chording, or pressing down multiple keys simultaneously. This means there's no benefit in having, say, a dedicated "b" key on the left hand, as pressing P- and W- together is easier.