Lesson 2 of 6
Streamlined letters & dropped vowels
Forkner's letters are your own cursive, minus the decoration. And its biggest single speed gain is embarrassingly simple: you stop writing most vowels.
Simplify your cursive
Forkner is written in joined, lowercase cursive, moving left to right — but stripped down. Every flourish you drop is time saved on every word for the rest of your life:
Lose the entry strokes. Start letters directly, without the little lead-in tail school cursive taught you.
Loops shrink. Tall loops on l, b, k and descender loops on g, y, j flatten into simple strokes — just enough to be recognizable.
Cross and dot at the end. Finish the whole word, then add any crosses, dots, or vowel marks. Never interrupt the forward motion of your pen mid-word.
No capital letters. Capitals are slow, so Forkner abandons them for ordinary writing and recycles them as symbols (you'll meet capital S and T in Lesson 4). Names and sentence starts are just written lowercase.
Drop short e — always
The short e sound (as in get, less, send) is the most common vowel sound in English, and Forkner simply omits it. No mark, no dot, nothing:
Read those back: ls, gt, snd. Notice how little the vowel was doing. Consonants carry the meaning of English words; vowels mostly just slow your pen down.
Drop other short vowels inside words
The same logic extends to the other short vowels — a, i, o, u — when they fall inside a word. In Lesson 3 you'll learn quick marks to show them when needed, but the habit to build now is leaving them out:
Vowels you hear clearly at the beginning or end of a word are kept, because they're doing real work there:
Practice set
Write each of these three times, saying the word as you write. Then cover the answers and write them again from the English alone.
| Word | Forkner skeleton | Why |
|---|---|---|
| help | hlp | short e dropped |
| best | bst | short e dropped |
| seven | svn | both short e's dropped |
| credit | crdt | short e and i dropped |
| minute | mnt | short i and u dropped, silent e |
| second | scnd | short e and o dropped |
| develop | dvlp | three short vowels dropped |
| benefit | bnft | three short vowels dropped |
Write it out
The practice set above is a warm-up you can copy. This is the real test: nothing to copy from, answers hidden until you've committed ink to paper.