Welcome to the ✨Current Corner✨

If you were looking for Henry Sweet’s Manual of Current Shorthand from 1892, you’ve found it! It is the (Henry) Sweetest shorthand ever. It is truly and entirely lineal, and it looks really darn fancy written with a broad edge pen.

The Manual

• The Preface positions Current against Pitman and Gabelsberger/Stolze, enumerates the advantages of Current, and recaps the development of the system.
  • It ends with a downer: everyone Sweet was excited to show the finished, printed version of the shorthand he’d been working on for a decade had died before he got to that point. E-hugs from the future, Señor Sweet. Publishing paid off!
• Orthographic Current describes the orthographic system. It provides a fast way to write words as they are spelt (orthographically), as opposed to how they are pronounced (phonetically).
  • The original text is about 25 handwritten pages describing the system followed by 15 pages of example texts demonstrating it at work. It’s a simpler system than Phonetic Current (so many fewer vowels!), so it’s a good place to start.
  • As of 1 January 2021, transcription of the Orthographic manual is complete. (It might in future be enhanced with further section headings and a transcription of the specimens not transcribed in the original manual.)
• Phonetic Current describes the phonetic system. The system is described in around 80 handwritten pages. These are followed by about 13 pages of example texts.
  • Transcription is a work in progress.
  • As of 18 Jan 2021, the text is complete through the initial vowel inventory. Work is underwear on the consonants.

Learning the Shorthand

Sweet was a good phoneticist, but not a good shorthand instructor. At least two regular writers of the shorthand — the journalist Thomas Satchell, who was noted for reliably writing the phonetic style at 150 WPM and teaching many students Current in Japan, and the lawyer FJO Coddington, who used Current in his work — are on record offering to provide or to write a better manual, but the publisher wasn’t interested.

Instead of those phantom manuals, your best pal might be Zach Smith’s A Curriculum of Current Phonetic Shorthand (April 2020), which tries “to lay out some of the same information contained in the manual in a more systematic and searchable way.” Think of it as a primer for the manual - it won’t replace it, but it will prevent it from actively confusing you.

You’ll also find writers sharing Current snippets and reviewing each other’s work within the r/shorthand Reddit community. That community is your best bet for getting feedback and answering any questions you might have about Current shorthand.