Wisconsin Explorer's Shorthand

On r/shorthand, an intriguing little sample of a shorthand system was posted by u/RealMourningStar. It was a sample from his grandfather's journal written while exploring the Wisconsin Territory. Pretty rapidly, it became clear it was some sort of Taylor variant, but not one whose manual is known. Over the next few days, u/Double_Show_9316 and I pieced it together in a joint effort: it has connected vowel symbols which can be written in-line, some mild use of shading (optionally) to provide a little disambiguating, and no use of the hooked characters within words to avoid awkward joins.

It turned out to be a pretty wonderful variant, prioritizing clarity and ease of writing over speed. I thought it was worth recording it in a little micro manual. The reconstructed rules are likely incomplete, but are enough to give it a try. Have fun!

The alphabet

The alphabet of the Wisconsin Explorers shorthand is essentially that of Taylor, but with connected vowel symbols, and some mild optional shading. A few observations:

  1. Loop direction matters. The direction that you loop characters cannot be chosen arbitrarily as in traditional Taylor shorthand, but instead is fixed for every letter. The only difference between "o" and "l" is the direction of the loop.
  2. Shading can matter if you want. The system sample was presented as shaded, but as it is a Taylor variant, it isn't needed. Several Taylor variants exist that let you use shading to disambiguate "f" and "v", however this system uses it for another purpose: to add flexibility to how you represent "r". In this system, "r" is any diagonal line drawn light. This lets you pick which one maintains the highest degree of linearity and compactness and write that one instead. Additionally, "d" can be written in either direction as a heavy stroke, also providing some degree of added flexibility. There is, however, no need to do any of this, and the system remains viable with traditional Taylor rules for "r" versus "d".
  3. All vowels can be written connected and medially. The main unique feature provided by this system is that it allows for connected, or medial, use of all vowels. These are assigned to fairly inefficient looped characters, and are thus written in somewhat different circumstances than in traditional Taylor. These are often written small and light, but can also occur as full height strokes. As a note: I have no clue why "i" is written with a dot over it. It seems completely unambiguous without it, and this is the only disjoint character present in the system.
  4. Hooked strokes are not used medially. In the writing sample available, the only hooked stroke that could occur is "th", so this is extrapolation from how that was used. For "th", it was always written initially using the hooked stroke in words the "the", "this", "thou", and so on. For words like "both", the "th" is instead written out fully as a "t" then an "h". This avoids many uncomfortable joins, at a pretty substantial cost of brevity.
  5. Small jogs are added to avoid bad joins. If two characters join without an angle, or with an obtuse angle, a small jog is added to interrupt the bad join. This happens in pairs like "ss" or "dn".

Abbreviation principles

There are additionally a few interesting components to how words are abbreviated beyond the standard Taylor rules.

  1. Most medial vowels are omitted, but not all. The typical rule of Taylor shorthand still holds for this system: medial vowels are rarely written. However, as all vowels are assigned connected characters, there is no reason to not write them medially when it is helpful.
  2. Vowels are omitted from most two letter words. For most two letter words, the consonant alone is used to represent it. This is likely due to how inefficient the vowels are to write compared to the standard Taylor dot character. They are sometimes included if it is "e" or "a" like "me" or "may" as these vowels connect the most easily, but are most often omitted in all other cases.
  3. Lateral vowels are omitted from common prefixes. Given how complex some vowels like "u" and "i" are, they are typically omitted at the beginning of words if they start with prefixes like "in-" or "un-".
  4. Common endings are reduced to a terminal loop. In traditional Taylor, loops can only be at the beginning of strokes, which means that an outline written in traditional Taylor never ends with a loop. This means that "ending with a loop" can be unambiguously used to represent common word endings. Thus, instead of "-ing", "-ings", "-tion", "—tions", "-ly", and so on, you instead write a single terminal loop. This is used for all common endings.
  5. Words that brief to only "o" are written as a loop. This is a rare rule, but any word that would make sense to brief to "o" is drawn just as a disjoint loop. This includes the words "of" and "on".

A short comparison with original Taylor

To give a little example, here are Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics written first in traditional Taylor, and then in the Wisconsin Explorer's Shorthand. Both of these are imperfectly rendered (I wrote them fairly quickly), but gives a flavor of the systems.

Wisconsin Explorer's

Original Taylor

Summary

Overall, I greatly enjoy the connected feeling of this Taylor variant but struggle with the shading (I have only ever done light line before). It is a bit longer in how it represents words, but with a large improvement in readability.

Some words, like "orders" are less scribbly due to the freedom in representing "r" and "d", but I'm not sure it is faster. Other words are vastly improved like "obey" which is quite inscrutable without the explicit vowels.

The fully light line version is also decently compelling as a system (where standard rules for "r" and "d" are used), and is fun to play with.

If you are a Taylor fan, give this version a try! Also, if you happen to have a manual that seems consistent with this system, let me know! I only know of the one artifact, and I'd love to know how close I got to the real rules!