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Shorthand writing...
It's very much not what i thought it was, but anyway.
There are three main types of shorthand, Teeline, Gregg and Pitman.
It was explained to me that Pitman is created by using different lengths, angles and widths of a line rather than having a large multitude of different symbols to signify things.
Which is what Teeline is; as it is a spelling based system and is written by connecting the words together, whilst removing the unecessary parts of the words to form abbreviations, such as the vowels.
Whereas Gregg is used through phonography, phonetic writing, as it records the sounds of the speaker and not the actual word such as using an 'f' instead of 'ph'.

The systems are used for a variety of tasks and depending on what task is required there is a system to suit. For my purpose of simply getting involved in something I will be attempting to learn the Teeline system. (mainly chosen because Pitman requires the writer to write with something of a caligraphy pen, although some changes have happened to appeal to the use of pencil, i'd prefer to not confuse myself with it, and because Gregg seems picky about line length down to mm, as several symbols are the same with only the length changes from small to large, which i don't trust myself to be able to be that attentative with due to my own natural scrawl when writing.)

to the Point...
in Teeline the words are written by connecting together the letters, against writing them individually, which goes towards the writing speed. Just as the abbreviations that are also used. This method is used to transcribe the spoken word quickly by reducing the number of letters, whilst increasing the speed that the remaining letters are written. The vowels are usually the letters removed, most particularly when they are not the beginning or the last letter of a word, also with silent letters which are ignored in the entirety.

The common prefixes, suffixes and word pairings, 'sh' and 'ing' for example, are changed into single symbols, which are taken from older cursive forms of the letter.

The rules of the system are simple; although it is common for personal adaptions to be made. The system is hinged on the word reduction; the general principles of word reduction in teeline shorthand are as follows;

1 - Remove silent letters, for example; 'make' becomes 'mak' , removing the 'e' at the end,'hedge' becomes 'heg', as the 'd' is combined with the 'g' sound.

2 - Omit vowels in the middle of the word, for example; 'make' = 'mak' which becomes 'mk', 'hedge' = 'heg' becomes 'hg'. Other situations of 'girl' which becomes'grl' as whilst the 'r' would be silent it is necessary to keep the word recognisable, and 'know' which becomes 'nw' due to the w being also silent but necessary and the 'kn' combination being reduced to the single 'n' as the 'k' would be redundant to the phonetics.

[NOTE: the vowels that reside at the start of a word and those that are distinct sounding (including at the end) must be written to provide a recognisable word.('cafe' - 'cfe'.)]

3 - Reduce double letters by one - 'cliff' - 'clf' and 'pepper' - 'ppr'. This is also applied to words with 'c' and 'k' together, at which point 'c' is uused for 'CK' and 'k' used for 'ke'. Such as 'luck' becoming 'lc'.

4 - Use the phonetic equivalent of a double consonant combination; that is instead of writing 'GH' or 'PH' the use of 'f' is applied for the same phonetic sound. For example; 'cough' becomes 'cf'', and 'telephone' becomes 'tlfn'.

Although the rules seem to take away too much of a word, as it leaves only the bare skeleton behind and it can be confusing due to some words being the same resulting letter combination, 'bk' could be 'book', 'bake' or 'bike'. However context usually solves the problem.