A Shorthand System

A Shorthand System

An excellent technique for taking better notes is to develop a personalized shorthand notation system. This strategy allows you to quickly record words and ideas without taking the time to write them out in their entirety.

Since your shorthand notation system need only be understood by you, any symbols or abbreviations that make sense are okay.

To get you started, here are some common examples of shorthand notations and their meanings.

Symbol	Meaning
=	equal, same as
¹	not equal, different
w/	with
w/r/t	with respect to
=>	leads to, gives rise to, etc.

You can also abbreviate long words after their first use (e.g., abbr.) and omit simple articles or prepositional phrases to further decrease the amount of writing in your notes. Remember, there are no hard and fast rules for developing a shorthand system, except that it must make sense to you.

• Develop shortcuts for the most commonly used words and make shortcuts for them.

• At the beginning of a term look through the textbooks for each course. Find the common terms that you'll see over and over and develop shortcuts for them.

  For example, words that might appear frequently in a literature class are character (ch), allegory (alg), allusion (allu), figure of speech (fos), and so on.

• Practice your course-specific shorthand at the beginning of the term, while your text is still new and you're curious and excited about the information. Find a few interesting passages and practice writing them in shorthand.

• If possible, find a study partner (or ask a parent) to read the passages to you. This will give you experience.
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• Time yourself for each passage you practice. Pretty soon you'll start to build up speed.

Sample Shortcuts
@	at, about, around
no.	number, amount
+	bigger, greater, increasing
?	who, what, where, why, where
!	surprise, alarm, shock
bf	before
bc	because
rts	results
resp	response
X	across, between