Handywrite: An Alternative Handwriting System - A handwriting system that used the simplist possible strokes for letters would, of course, be faster to write with than longhand, which uses several, sometimes as many as four, strokes for each letter. And if the system were phonetic, words couldn’t be misspelled! The usual 26 letter alphabet just doesn’t have enough letters to represent all the 32+ sounds used in English, especially vowel sounds, so several letters are often used to represent a single sound. The word “ought,” for example, uses five letters to write only two sounds. So a really slick form of handwriting would use one stroke for one sound. Simple, but too difficult? Not necessarily. You just need to learn to hear the sounds that you use when speaking English so you can write them, and then learn some simple symbols to represent those sounds. Since you have been taught to pay attention to 26 letters and not the actual sounds of English, tuning in to speech sounds may take a little time, but can also be quite interesting and fun. This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.