Daily Inspiration Quote by John Robert Gregg

A neat little manifesto disguised as a technical note, Gregg's line reads like a jab at the fussy gatekeeping of "proper" writing. He is talking about the mechanics of shorthand, but he is also staking out a philosophy: speed and clarity beat decorative tradition. "It doesn't use shading" rejects the old calligraphic trick where thicker downstrokes signal meaning. Shading flatters the eye, but it demands the right pen, the right pressure, the right paper, the right training. In other words, it makes writing a craft for initiates.

Gregg replaces that with "stroke length variations", a more democratic variable. Length is easier to control at high velocity, less dependent on a special nib, and more forgiving in real-world conditions: hurried notes, cheap pencils, tired hands. That shift is not just ergonomic; it is ideological. It suggests an inventor's suspicion of systems that look elegant while slowing people down, and a preference for design choices that scale to everyday users.

The subtext is also defensive. By the late 19th and early 20th century, shorthand systems competed like tech platforms, each promising efficiency. Gregg is pre-empting a critique: if you think the system is "simpler" because it avoids shading, that simplicity is engineered, not a loss. The sentence has the calm confidence of someone selling a future where writing becomes less about performance and more about throughput: information captured before it evaporates.