Pencil Shorthand

“Martín Córdoba discovered that within shorthand signs, so simple and often underestimated, there dwells an aesthetic universe. Where others see only speed and technique, he perceives rhythm, cadence, formal beauty, and silence transformed into art. His vision turns each stroke into a story, each sign into contemplation, and reveals that pencil shorthand is a graphic language capable of moving even those of us who do not know its code” (Lic. Natalia Martínez, author of the poems  “Where the Sign Breathes” ,  “ Academias Pitman ” , and of the poetic epigraphs for the blogs La Taquigrafía and Shorthand Calligraphy ).

My Beginnings as a Parliamentary Shorthand Writer By Martín Córdoba I remember that April 1, 1997, as if it were yesterday. I was 21 years old and found myself in the Legislature of Tucumán, taking shorthand notes of the governor’s speech during the inaugural session of the ordinary period. It was only my first year in the corps of shorthand writers, and I still carried with me the uncertainty of someone beginning to discover his destiny. In this photo, I can be seen writing without a cosmetic prosthesis on my forearm, while the absence of my left foot —which I tried to replace with a conventional Syme prosthesis— and the difficulties in all the fingers of my right hand —the one I used to write— formed the reality of my limitations. Nevertheless, there I was, determined that nothing would prevent me from fulfilling my vocation. This image reveals the truth of my beginnings: my will facing the task with what I had. At that time, my inseparable companion was a double-ended pencil, always...

Academias Pitman : Parliamentary Shorthand and the Educational Work of Juan María Jan By Martín Córdoba This is how the expression “la taquigrafía” is written using the signs of the Academias Pitman method of Argentina, a prestigious educational institution founded in Buenos Aires in 1919. Throughout its history, it came to have more than 40 branches, most of them in Argentina and some in Uruguay, where it began operating in 1929. Professor Juan María Jan (Jean-Marie Jan), one of its founders, was the one who translated, refined, and simplified Sir Isaac Pitman’s system. Thanks to Professor Jan’s excellent method —edited and published for several decades by Academias Pitman under the title  Taquigrafía Pitman Comercial y Parlamentaria — numerous parliamentary shorthand writers were trained, who went on to serve in various deliberative bodies in Argentina and Uruguay. The International Projection of the Academias Pitman Method and Jan’s Educational Work Jan, of French origin ...

“ Academias Pitman ” By Natalia Martínez In the memory of the sign the teaching still breathes, Academias Pitman , house of strokes and silences, where speed became discipline and discipline, art. There, in the classrooms of Tucumán, the pencil learned to listen to the cadence of parliament, to translate voices into geometries, to preserve in each line the urgency of what was spoken and the calm of what was written. Jean-Marie Jan, visionary, simplified the system so that the sign might be clear, so that the word could be memory and testimony. And in the student, shorthand became craft and devotion, code and prayer. Today, when Martín recalls  his years of training, pencil shorthand  intertwines with poetry: because what was once method is also breath, and what was once academy is now legacy.

“The marvelous signs of pencil shorthand, traced upon paper, continue to expand everywhere; they never stopped and never will”  (Martín Córdoba) .