Shorthand

• Secretaries and transcribers have long used shorthand, a form of phonetic writing that condenses phoneme and phoneme groups in order to use less writing to record those sounds. English has around 50 different speech sounds, but only 26 letters to represent those sounds, requiring combinations of letters to make a single sound. Shorthand writing has simple symbols for every sound and simple singular symbols for common combinations of sounds. A skilled shorthand writer can record sounds up to three times faster than someone writing with the regular alphabet in cursive.
  
  

Pronunciation Guides

• One form of phonetic writing is that used to teach foreign languages. Common written forms in the native language for particular combinations of sounds are used to guide the pronunciation of words in the language being learned. For example, an English speaker learning Spanish might encounter the word boligrafo (Spanish for "ball point pen"). A written phonetic guide for the correct pronunciation might read "Bow-Lee-Grah'-Foe." The writing is not strictly phonetic, matching letters to sounds, but uses familiar patterns with which the learner is already familiar to ensure the correct phonemes, in this case especially for the vowels which differ between English and Spanish.
  
  

Intentional Misspellings -- Dialects

• Some writers do something similar to what pronunciation guides do to represent regional dialects. A writer might be quoting a gardener from Maine who is discussing how to plant carrots, for example. The gardener says, "I never thin carrots." The writer, to catch the flavor of the regional dialect may write that as, "Ah nevah thin cahrets." Fiction writers frequently employ this kind of phonetic writing to create a more compelling sense of being there.
  
  

Orthography and Orthoepy

• Orthography is a set of rules for how to correctly write in a given language. In the dictionary, the first spelling of a word is written according to orthography, usually with hyphens between syllables and an accent mark to indicate where the proper stress is for pronunciation. Orthoepy is a set of rules, based on graphic symbols combined with letters to differentiate the correct sounds of words. Orthoepic representations of words in the dictionary follow the orthographic spelling, to specify the correct spoken sounds. An attempt to standardize orthoepy for all sounds in all languages was made in 1888 with development of the International Phonetic Alphabet.