Quikscript

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The front page of the Quikscript manual. The Quikscript text reads, "This is the way to do it."

Quikscript (also known as the Read Alphabet and Second Shaw) is an alternate alphabet for the English language, designed to be phonetically regular, compact, and comfortably and quickly written. There are also adapted Quikscript alphabets for other languages, using the same letters for sounds which do not exist in English.

George Bernard Shaw, famous writer, critic and playwright, was dissatisfied with the limits of currently available shorthand methods. He was also mightily displeased with the vagaries of English spelling, and wanted a phonetic reworking of the written language. In his will, he provided for a competition, and Kingsley Read won it with his "Shavian" script. After a lengthy public testing phase with about 500 users from around the world, Read decided to revise the alphabet and renamed it "Quikscript." In 1966 he published a manual for the new alphabet.

There are about forty unique symbols in the script, plus some ligatures (characters formed of multiple characters joined together, much as æ or ﬁ are in some Roman alphabet scripts). The characters are designed so that many of them will flow into one another without the necessity of connecting links and while still maintaining readability. Furthermore, they are easy to write by hand. In the last few years, Quikscript computer fonts have been developed so that the alphabet can be used with computers and the Internet.

Book two of the popular Cole's Funny Picture Books, published in Australia by E. W. Cole at the turn of the 20th century, was revised in 1979 to include an article introducing Quikscript under the name Second Shaw.