Fall Approaches

The crowded campus returns
Inconvenient hordes of people
Motorized vehicles on the sidewalk
People whizzing down the hallways
   Who aren't me
Shouting in the free speech area
   "Student radio!"
   "Stop terrorizing animals!"
Getting bothered
   "May I have your name for [the student paper]?"
   "Do you have time to save the environment?"
But there are lots of things going on, and improving weather
   Not quite ninety degrees,
   It feels good to sit in the shade
   In the stiff breeze
   Listening to poetry on the plaza.

Going with Gregg

Today I got my book on Teeline and I don't like it at all. First, I don't think it's meant to be used alone but in a classroom. Definitely things are introduced poorly and it's just not as well-written as my book on Gregg.

Second, the letters don't look any easier to remember than the letters in Gregg, which I thought was the whole point.

Third, it appears that one of the techniques for speeding things up is to leave out the vowels. Gregg will leave out the extra silent letters that help you see which sound your vowel is supposed to make, which is bad enough, and they leave out the vowels in unaccented syllables, which makes sense in English, but they don't leave the vowels out altogether. Bleh, not interested.

Gregg does have a lot of shortened forms for very common words, which is probably just as bad. Though I could probably ignore those if I felt like it and still have a faster way to write. Overall, it feels like I understand the logic of Gregg better than Teeline, at least as presented by the books I have. So I am going with Gregg. And that is despite the negatives.

The first negative is that it looks sort of like Arabic to the untrained eye. That could get one in trouble with ignoramuses in these post-9/11 times. (Teeline looks more like Egyptian to me, although I don't actually know what Egyptian looks like. Hey, I'm just as ignorant as the next American. Probably Egyptians speak Arabic nowadays anyway. Yep.)

The other negative is that each chapter opens with a brief essay about how great it is to be a secretary. The book I have was first published 45 years ago, so the cultural parts of it kind of hurt to read. But they are easily ignored.