"Cleard to somewhere airport Maintain runway heading until 800feet left turn 200 radar vectors to seal beach victor XYZ to Paradise as filed, climb and maintain 3000 expect one zero thousand 10 minutes after departure, departure frequency is 127.2 sqwark 4626".....
Very easy to write down though:
RH 800
L 200
RV SLI
V XYZ
PDZ
A Filed
3000
x10000 10
127.2
4626
And so you end up squawking 3000 and climbing to 4626 feet. And this doesn't involve the QNH then, which is usually also four digits. Do you have any trick of distinguising them?
There was a thread on the ATC forum a while ago about the shorthand used by them. For "climb and maintain" and "descend and maintain" they used the appropriate diagonal line followed by a horizontal bit, in front of the altitude or FL.
QNH gets prefixed with Q when I write it down (ATC obviously doesn't need to write that down on the slip since it's all the same for all aircraft) and the squawk stays a single number.
But for VFR flights I like to receive those numbers, put them in the instruments and then read them back from the instruments.
As an aside, I once took a flight in the Europa demo plane G-KITS (or was it G-EURO) and this one had a "clearance recorder" fitted. One or two buttons to operate, and it would record 20 seconds or so of audio. Press the record button at the appropriate time and the whole clearance is recorded for later reference. It looked like a good gadget to have at that time (when I hadn't even started my PPL yet) but is anyone using it?