Radiohead to the Rescue

As a journalism student I have to learn something called Teeline Shorthand. It is a form of note taking but instead of using letters you use symbols to represent words and us journalists use to it increase the speed in which we can take notes.

Radiohead Creep written in shorthand

I hate it. I am not good with spelling, letters or words (I know, it is a wonder how I made it onto this course) and so I find shorthand especially hard. Primarily it is being able to hear the word, recognize the letters in the word and then recalling how the letter is written in shorthand and writing it down. It is tough. On Wednesday we have our 60 words per minute exam...which means we need to be able to write a word a second. It sounds easy but give it a try. It's really not.

I have been working hard listening to the text book passages about teenagers vandalising graveyards and police arresting residents for dropping litter and as you can imagine I am going mad. Therefore i decided to try and write out songs in shorthand.

I couldn't manage anything too fast and so I went straight for my Radiohead album, Radiohead (The Best Of) and began trying to write out the lyrics as Thom Yorke slowly sang them to me. I tried with a few of their songs and feeling confident I went back to the nice boring textbook transcriptions. To my disbelief it had actually helped a lot and I was able to transcribe that bit quicker!

So thank you Radiohead, I am sure when you were writing you slow mellow music you had me in mind stressing over shorthand. Cheers Lads x