Is shorthand used anymore?

My mother was a shorthand typist and I remember she tried unsuccessfully to teach shorthand to me. She was incredibly fast and accurate in using shorthand but I don’t see a need for it in the modern world. Latterly I don’t think she used it at all herself as her boss had a dictaphone machine.

I taught myself Gregg shorthand and used a combination of that and regular cursive to take notes in one class after my scrawl evolved into illegible scribbles. I also thought it would be a fun thing to learn, obviously the intelligent solution would be to be more selective about what you write in the first place.

In situations where technology is permitted, it definitely is not used any more, except by enthusiasts, and then probably not in their occupation.

The only place I have seen it used in the last few years is when ( for whatever reason ) the parties to a conversation don’t want it recoded verbatim, but do want a record made. This does not happen very often, at least in my experience.

I think there are still a few old school print media journalists who use it at press conferences. I know I was interviewed a few years back and all the notes were in shorthand.

I know a young (youngish; everyone is ‘young’ to me these days) who works in IT, of all fields, and takes all her notes in shorthand while listening to and participating in program development sessions. She writes out most of the discussion—from all parties—in shorthand so that at the end of the meeting she can clearly enumerate and elucidate what were the salient points and which way the program / database will be modified, enhanced, debugged or whatever we’ve been discussing, and by having all of her notes that way, she can—and often does—have backup when things don’t work exactly as planned, because she can point to the page in her book and read the conversation back to us months later, if need be, to prove that this was exactly what we wanted.

I wish that I had learned shorthand.

Court reporters both in court and in deposition still use shorthand although now, instead of hand writing, they use a “stenotype” machine which has shorthand symbols instead of letters on its keyboard. This is referred to as ‘computer aided transcription’. See here

Some journalists still use shorthand. It is very useful. I used to be able to do 100wpm, but stopped using it and I don’t remember it now.