I’ve started over, and am learning Evans shorthand after spending about two years learning Gregg shorthand.
It’s a lot of work, taking new shapes for sounds and pasting them into my head over old ones, but the groundwork I did in learning Gregg has been extremely helpful. My mum sent me a scan of a page in her Pitman book, and I could immediately spot the similarities and differences: all of these systems are trying to do the same thing.
What I like about Evans, why I’m ultimately choosing it over other systems, is that it’s compact. Here’s a sentence in Gregg, then in Evans:
This vitally important piece of communication is “Do not meddle with the hot metal.”
My handwriting has always been small and controlled, and when I make notes I tend toward what’s called “sketchnoting“. My frustration with Gregg is that it’s so big and loopy that, to my hand, it felt like going down stairs on roller skates. And it didn’t fit into call-out boxes beside illustrations; it wanted to escape off to the other side of the page.
So hello, Evans, and thank you.
The thing I find most confusing about it so far is that Gregg was rigidly phonetic (with diphthongs spelled out in full”””white” becoming “oo-i-te”””tedious!) whereas this sometimes switches and honours the double sounds of Roman letters, so C can be a K-sound or an S-sound. To my Gregg-conditioned mind, that’s heretical. But it has Xs and Ws and Ys, for which I am very grateful.
/end of shorthand geekery. Thank you for your patience.
EDIT: Mom sent me the same phrase in Pitman’s: