Is it easy to learn Teeline shorthand?

That’s a question I’m asked loads of times and my answer is always the same: How long is a piece of string?

I know people who’ve found Teeline easy and passed first time at 100wpm after nine months or so and others (including me) who took ages to get their speed up to the required 100wpm before taking the exam and only passing after two, three or more attempts!

But shorthand isn’t rocket science and trust me if I can do it (albeit eventually!) it can’t be that difficult.

It's the industry standard shorthand system used in the UK by journalists and probably one of the easiest types of shorthand systems out there.

It was designed by Pitman tutor, James Hill, who I’m guessing must have known many of us would be quaking in out boots at the mere mention of the ‘s’ word so deliberately made it easy!

At face value the shorthand outlines can look difficult – all lines and curves - but once you understand the system and have learnt the alphabet it’s amazing how easy it is to get your head around it. It’s improving your speed that tends to be the hard bit.

As for the system itself the main principles are that it deletes all double letters and silent letters. So if you’re writing the word ‘cuddle’ you’d only use the shorthand symbol for one of the ‘ds’ and the silent ‘e’ would go.

It also removes vowels unless it’s at the beginning of a word or sounded at the end. So you’d keep the vowel ‘I’ if you were writing ‘it’ and the ‘e’ of coffee.

At some point I’ll do a video to explain more about Teeline shorthand and have a look at my other posts on the blog under the label Teeline Shorthand that will hopefully help you out too. So yeah, watch this space for more posts!