be yourself

Review week.  this is the week when everything comes together - lots of reading and practice with the new rules and brief forms all together.

this week I actually have a real quote for you, instead of some random nonsense sentence!  yay!

catching up

I'm lagging a bit behind this month.

The last part of last week and the beginning of this week were a bit crazy and I just didn't have the time/energy to study as I should. So the remainder of this week will be catching up with unit 9 and review will be pushed back to next week.

Here is something I wrote up last week but ran out of time to write it out neatly to scan and post:

Arrrrrr!

(And it isn't even Talk Like a PirateDay)

Image via Daily Gregg

(warning this post uses a bit of IPA)

I just finished up Unit 8, where we are introduced to the special "R" rules. Unit 8 is only concerned with the "ur/ir/er/ar" sound in relation to the beginning or ending of a straight stroke. For the rest of the Anniversary's method of expressing "R" I'll need to wait until Unit 20.

R is weird - In America, some people say it is a vowel, but that isn't quite right. R is a bully, specifically R doesn't like shwas (ə). To quote one of the phonics books that I used to teach my son to read: when R comes after an I, E or U it likes to squish it down so far that you can hardly hear it at all - all you can hear is "er"(ɚ) (note: "ar" is really "ɑ" plus "ɚ")

So in Anniversary Gregg, R colored shwas are expressed by reversing the circle.*

Like the graphic above states, this special method (reversing the circle) is unique to Anniversary, In simplified and later editions, they just write the R out. I don't have the simplified manual, so I don't know exactly how the rule is stated, and I'm not quite sure why they decided to change it. (Ok, I actually do have an idea: This special rule is one more thing to memorize, and [looking ahead to unit 20] it can probably be a bit difficult to write smoothly without a lot of drilling practice. And it may be a bit more difficult to read fluently.) But it is definitely something to keep in mind when reading old found shorthand notes, or when choosing a method to learn.

On a personal note I usually prefer the way the Anniversary reversed circle words look, but there are a handful of Simplified versions that I think look nicer.  Maybe once I'm all done with Anniversary I'll get a Simplified manual and I'll blend the two versions for a more pleasing to my eye hybrid.

*

There are exceptions when it would be impossible or really hard to write quickly, like "air"

And since Gregg isn't really a wholly phonetic system, sometimes the rules are bent a bit to to make other words that don't quite fit that description easier/quicker to write.

books

halfway through unit 8