My Beginnings as a Parliamentary Shorthand Writer

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 sharpened carefully at both ends. During my years of training at Academias Pitman (1993 and 1994), and later already graduated, I used to go to the prestigious “Schicri Mulki” bookstore, where I bought dozens of pencils and notebooks to practice —during long and silent hours— the accuracy and speed required by shorthand writing, striving to maintain the fidelity and clarity of the signs.

I also remember how I worked during a session: I would take the shorthand version in the Chamber of Sessions —located on the ground floor of the old Legislature building at Virgen de la Merced 25— and then had to climb the long staircase up to the corps of shorthand writers on the first floor to transcribe my notes. That physical journey was also a symbol: each step represented the effort of transforming difficulty into possibility, limitation into path.

Today, when I look at this photograph, I feel it holds a special value: it is the testimony that vocation and effort can overcome any obstacle. I recognize myself in that young man who, among pencils and notebooks, was beginning to write not only the words of others, but also the story of his own life.




That same vocation, born among pencils and notebooks, continues today in other spaces created by Martín Córdoba, dedicated to shorthand in its technical, educational, historical, and artistic dimensions: La Taquigrafía (Spanish), Caligrafía Taquigráfica (Spanish), Taquigrafía a Lápiz (Spanish), Shorthand Calligraphy, Calligraphie Sténographique (French), A Caligrafia Taquigráfica (Portuguese), Kalligraphische Stenografie (German), and Calligrafia Tachigrafica (Italian).

This article is also available in Spanish.

Popular posts from this blog

Academias Pitman and Parliamentary Shorthand

Image
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 ...
Read more

"Academias Pitman" (Poetry)

“ 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.
Read more