Lesson 6 of 6
Building speed
You now know the whole system. What separates knowing Forkner from writing Forkner is drill — specifically dictation, where the words come at you on a clock.
The three drills that matter
1. Copy drill (fluency). Take a paragraph of your shorthand and copy it over and over, a little faster each pass. This burns outlines into muscle memory. Sloppy is fine; hesitation is the enemy.
2. Dictation drill (speed). Have text read aloud at a fixed pace and keep up, whatever it takes. Modern trick: paste any article into a text-to-speech app, set the speed, press play. Start around 40 words per minute and raise the rate only when a passage feels easy twice in a row.
3. Read-back drill (accuracy). Reading your shorthand aloud — same day and again next day — is what makes it a real writing system instead of a party trick. If you stumble on an outline, that word goes on your drill list.
Write it out — timed
Here is graded material to run those three drills on. Everything below is timed, so keep a clock or phone stopwatch next to the notebook. Write the passage, stop the clock, then check your paper against the key and count your errors honestly — a passage written fast and unreadable doesn't count.
Scoring your speed. Words per minute = words ÷ seconds × 60. The targets:
| Passage | Words | 40 wpm | 50 wpm | 60 wpm | 80 wpm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 25 | 38 s | 30 s | 25 s | 19 s |
| B | 50 | 75 s | 60 s | 50 s | 38 s |
| C | 75 | 112 s | 90 s | 75 s | 56 s |
A passage counts as passed only when you can read it back cleanly the next day. Move up a passage — not a speed — when you pass twice in a row.
A four-week plan
| Week | Daily 15 minutes | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lessons 1–3 examples; write your diary/to-dos phonetically without short vowels | Comfortable skeletons |
| 2 | Lesson 4 symbols in everything; flashcard the symbol deck | Symbols without thinking |
| 3 | Brief forms + phrasing; dictation at 40–50 wpm | Starter forms automatic |
| 4 | Dictation at 60+ wpm; read back yesterday's notes every day | Real notes, real speed |
After week 4: keep taking your everyday notes in Forkner. Daily real-world use beats any drill.
Make it yours
Every long-term shorthand writer ends up with a personal edition: extra brief forms for their own field's vocabulary (db for database, mtg for meeting, initials for coworkers' names). This is a feature, not cheating — Forkner himself built the system around the vocabulary of business correspondence. Keep a running list on the last page of your notebook, and promote a word to a brief form once you've written it out ten times in a week.
Where to go next
The original textbooks. Used copies of Forkner Shorthand by Hamden L. Forkner (4th or 6th edition) and the companion Correlated Dictation and Transcription books are inexpensive and contain hundreds of graded dictation passages plus the complete brief-form vocabulary.
Community. The r/shorthand community and shorthand wikis compare systems, share drills, and can read your outlines when you're stuck.
This site. The Practice page's flashcards and quiz are built for daily review — and the cheat sheet prints nicely for your desk.