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About writing fast - Part 1 - (Shorthand, languages and philosophy)

Quick personal introduction

In my 20s everything was about speed. Reach to success quickly, growing as fast as possible, show the world you can do that now.

Now in my 30s it's being about enjoying the road, calming down, being in the present.

This daily basis philosophy has changed every day, with failures and successes, with a different body and different brain, and new environment and conditions.

Yesterday I learned about Toki Pona, and was surprisingly intrigued about minimalism, community and many other interesting ideas behind it. (Thanks to everyone writing about it on Gemini)

Writing differently

Having an alternative to the traditional communication systems have been appealing to me. Braille, Sign Language, Morse, Emojis, Unicode, Toki Pona... Most of them are created on top of already known languages. What's the language you think on?

It has been interesting to me how different is to think, to talk and to write. And of many different ways to represent ideas, then phrases, words, symbols and such. I'm only a hobbyist, so excuse any mistake from the ideas in this text.

Anyway, I have been intrigued about how writing and typing is slow.

A human can think at 400 words per minute (wpm), read at 220 wpm, talking at 150 wpm, typing on a good keyboard on 40 wpm and writing by hand with 15 wpm. That's many, many times lower. If writing shapes our thinking process it's something there.

Thinking slower?

There is an interesting conversation about if we should think and read that fast. Some people say that the actual deep reading should be slower. The same for spoken conversations, it's not about saying a lot of stuff but understanding each other. The same with listening podcast or watching videos at 1.5x or 2x. But that's a conversation for later.

Quora - Can we type in English faster that we speak

Quora - Handwriting speed

Introducing the old and reliable Shorthand

I remember my mother telling me she studied Shorthand (taquigrafía in Mexican Spanish), and hearing somewhere about having a stenotypist to offer subtitles in realtime for conferences, so impaired people could actually understand the conference.

Shorthand systems were required for journalists and secretaries 40 years ago. It's still being used in some juries to have a record of a trial.

Img - Shorthand example from Wikipedia

Maybe today that's not required. It's easy to take out a phone and start recording a conversation or speech. YouTube offers simple Closed captioning for any video with help of an AI. Relying on technology is cool and convenient, but at the same time takes the humanity out of it, if you ask me.

Nowadays I started practicing some shorthand systems, and even creating a 'new' one, only because. I think I should share about it in a next time. Thanks for reading this slowly typed text!

EOT

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