SHORTHAND STILL VITAL IN OFFICE WORK

Left, Amanda York, a student at the Cape Girardeau Area Vocational-Technical School, wrote shorthand as her teacher, Barbara Lohr, dictated the lesson.

Shorthand drops various letters of the alphabet in the interest of speed.

To the unpracticed eye, a page of Gregg shorthand looks like nothing more than illegible scribbles.

To trained office workers, it looks like a letter, a page of instructions or a telephone message.

Developed in 1888, the form of writing substitutes small symbols for sounds. An "M" for example, is a long dash, while the "A" sound is represented by a circle, so the word "may" would be written as a dash with a circle at the end.

In Gregg shorthand, one only writes the sounds he hears.

The trouble is, Gregg takes a long time to learn. Barbara Lohr, an office technology teacher at Cape Girardeau Vocational-Technical School, said it takes 48 theory lessons and an hour of homework each night to learn it -- not a pleasant prospect for students.

Because of its difficulty, Gregg has been dropped from most high school curricula. In Cape Girardeau, adult students may take a refresher course, but instructor Anita Tygett hasn't had one of them in a year.

The abbreviated writing of today is called ABC Shorthand, SuperWrite or Stenoscript. All very similar, these forms of shorthand use the Roman alphabet but chop out letters one doesn't hear. They also use capital letters to represent sound blends, including th, ch and sh.

Students can learn SuperWrite in 20 lessons with about 20 minutes of homework a night. The only drawback is speed -- 80 or 90 words per minute is the maximum. Any proficient Gregg shorthand student can take 120 words per minute.

Homework is copying pages of the writing form several times in a workbook and then a steno notebook. Tygett advises her students not to copy a word unless they plan to take time to read it back. One skill is useless without the other.

Lohr and Tygett recommend SuperWrite for, not only business majors, but college-bound students who will be taking lots of notes.

"If you have any sense of language, you will have more aptitude," Tygett said. "You have to learn to take words down phonetically and then go to the computer and transcribe them back into English."

Several of her students are adults who need shorthand skills to get promotions.

Lohr told of one group from Sikeston whose employer paid for classes. Another woman was up for a promotion but felt she couldn't get it without shorthand.

Alice McFerron is an adult office technology student from Chaffee. After years of motherhood and work as a church secretary, she felt she was ready to develop skills and get a job working with people. Shorthand may help.

"It's challenging, and you have to have the time to spend with it," McFerron said. "I feel that, at this point, I'm doing well."

Lana Cook graduated from Cape Central High School in 1975, proficient in Gregg shorthand. Today she is the office manager for Dr. John Freeze.

She signed up for shorthand in high school and hated it, but her counselor wouldn't let her drop the class. When Cook broke her finger playing basketball, she was sure the injury would be her ticket out of shorthand. She was wrong.

"The teacher said I would thank her someday, and I did," Cook said. "My first job was as a secretary in the billing department of an office. I had to have shorthand."

Later, she was chosen over another contender for a job at the State Farm Insurance headquarters because she had shorthand skills.

Cook uses shorthand now to take patients' problems down over the phone.