Eleventh-grade students from 11 high schools participated in this study of the effect of beginning shorthand on language arts skills. Pre- and posttests drawn from the California Achievement Test for Language Arts were administered to experimental groups and control groups in September and April of the 1974-75 academic year. Results indicated that shorthand students did better than did nonshorthand students in punctuation, spelling, and vocabulary but not in word usage, capitalization, reading comprehension, or in the combined language arts test. Shorthand students at the lower achievement level generally did better than did those at the middle and upper achievement levels when compared with equivalent groups of nonshorthand students. (Author/AA)