New Speed Students, Learn To Let Go

I spend a good deal of time interacting with self-learners and some new students. One thing that new people often struggle with is the switch from QWERTY-style typing to our stenotype keyboard. What do I mean?

Picture this. How many times on a regular keyboard have you typed something quickly, only to realize it is wrong? Backspace, backspace, backspace, fix! This habit is ingrained in pretty much anyone that has been raised typing on a computer. That’s what we do. It doesn’t make sense to do it another way because you’d have to go back and fix it later anyway.

Well, all that changes when it’s time to do steno. In the early days, we must learn to let go and just get the take. Perhaps captioners will disagree, but I feel it strongly hampers a person’s natural progression, early on, to be using the asterisk to correct every little messed up keystroke. In the beginning, put an emphasis on reading through your mistakes. But correcting them on your tests or in your practice takes will likely take time away from creating the muscle memory you need to succeed.

All of this is said with one caution: If you notice a serious problem with a group of words, you need to practice out that problem. Create a finger drill. Reach out to a mentor. Talk to your teachers. Heck, reach out to me. You don’t want to end up a professional reporter who drags their S into every stroke or something semi-critical like that.

Another thing: Do not be surprised if someone disagrees with what I have to say. In the stenographic learning process there tends to be two schools of thought. There is speed, and there is accuracy. There are, in fact, people who believe that accuracy is paramount and you cannot advance in speed without accuracy. My own experience is that with speed comes accuracy. If you can stroke out a sloppy 240, you can probably jam out a neat 180 or 200, and a passing 225. I have had failing tests turn to a pass because I sat down with my notes and really looked at what I had.

A mentor outside the stenographic field once told me, “your hesitation is what kills you.” When it came to steno school, I took that to heart, I stopped hesitating. I urge every student to do the same so that you can get out of school, make some money, and change some lives in this wonderful field.

If you enjoyed this article, check out my old assorted tips for students.

Shortage Solutions 7: Recruitment

Check out our new table of contents!

So today we’re going to put into words one of the philosophies we go by. We have been over lots of ways for professionals and companies to beat the shortage or perceived shortage. Today we’re going to dive into the numbers.

Hopefully, we can all agree that stenography is somewhat easy to learn but incredibly difficult to do fast. Even if we can’t agree on that, we can agree there’s a high dropout rate because of the amount of focus and practice that goes into doing what we do. There is a certain percentage of people that hear about stenography, a certain percentage of people that try it, a certain percentage that like it, and a certain percentage that love it and want it to be their career. Empirically, it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to make the education easier without sacrificing performance. So the amount of people that make it to the end will pretty much always be lower.

So let’s fake some numbers. Let’s say for every 1000 people that hear about steno, 100 try it. Let’s say 10 of those 100 are good. Let’s say 1 of those 10 loves this field and wants it to be their career. Can we, as professionals, impact those bottom numbers, and get it to be, you know, 5 people who love it and want to make it a career? A 500 percent increase? Debatable. I say let’s try.

But what do we have very direct control over? That first number. The number of people who hear about stenography. The number of people who know it’s a thing. How many people have you met that don’t believe we exist anymore? How many people have you met that don’t believe we are typing or taking down every word?

Indeed, these are likely the same principles on which A to Z, Project Steno, or Open Steno Project were founded. It’s about lowering barriers like tuition or general steno knowledge. It’s about understanding that every impression has a chance at getting someone to start the path, and that every person that starts the path has a shot at finishing it, however low or high you think that shot is.

There are different ways to perform this outreach, via social media, physical appearance at job fairs, or use of other avenues. There are already many people who have taken up recruitment efforts, and if it’s something you’re into, you can either join an existing movement or jumpstart your own thing. 10 years ago, a lot of the programs we’ve just mentioned were in their infancy or didn’t exist at all. Who is to say that your own idea won’t take off the same way?

Veritext Scholarships

So we’ve got a bit of good news here. Veritext announced on May 20, 2019 that it was expanding its scholarship program. Now, obviously, this information is directly from the company. We can’t say for sure what’s happening in Minnesota, Washington, or elsewhere, but let’s be cautiously optimistic and assume this news is one hundred percent true for a moment.

It’s a good start. We’ve got to support these companies taking on the funding of education. There’s been a strong wave of stenographer activism since the big push for digital began, and this may be a tacit admission that steno is here to stay. Nothing but praise for Veritext today. Now, more than ever, is a great time for all companies to get out there and tell the field about their efforts in steno education. We are starving for good news! But, of course, we would be abdicating our moral responsibilities if we didn’t offer some suggestions.

Schools, reach out to the company and see if you can join their program. It never hurts to make a contact.

Veritext, according to the Ducker Report, the big four states for reporting are California, New York, Illinois, and Texas. Some of the largest shortage cries come from at least three of those states. It would be most helpful to our field if you would expand scholarships to those locations when possible.

Also Veritext, if you continue to support rolling out the digital stuff alongside the stenography scholarships, it’s going to be assumed that the scholarships are hedging your bets and the digital is your real investment. This probably isn’t the public perception that you want your stenographers walking into your depositions with. On the flip side, if stenography becomes the primary focus, stenographers will be more loyal and less likely to poach clients. As an accountant once explained, it’s just how the world works.

Some will be skeptical because Veritext was formerly making a major push for digital by asking attorneys to amend their notices to allow it. Anecdotally, as recently as May 20, commentators online were stating that Veritext was attempting to send a videographer only to a dep. We shouldn’t forget that. We need to continue to make everybody aware that some companies are taking an active role in supplanting stenographic reporting. But if this is a sign that there can be a pivot and a turning point in the right direction, we look forward to heaping on more praise, letting the past be the past, and seeing stenographers remain the guardians of the record well into the future.

Easy E-Signature in CaseCAT

There are a great number of ways to achieve an E-signature. Among the least expensive and least reliant on outside vendors like Adobe or Real Legal is detailed here.

Go to your certification include.
CTRL + Print Screen, also known as PRT SCRN on some keyboards, usually next to scroll lock and above insert or home keys. This takes an image of your screen.
Go to the paint program, paste it into paint with CTRL + V.
Use the select tool in paint to select a small box of your signature line and the space above it. Right click and copy. Alternatively, use CTRL + C to copy.
Paste it into a new paint file. Make sure the paint file is only as large as your signature image.
Draw your signature in. Save the file as a .png.
Go back to CaseCAT and create a new certification include. Delete the blank line, F4 + L for new line, and then edit, insert, image. Bring the signature image into your cert. Remember to save!
E-Signing without reliance on other vendors.
Please note, on some laptops and keyboards, the print screen function requires you to press the fn or function key before it will work. So you may have to hit CTRL + Fn + PRT SCRN.

If you liked that, you may also want to see my tutorial on CaseCAT characters per line using characters per inch. Remember that if you need CaseCAT training, Stenograph maintains a page for Certified Training Agents.

Finger Drill Generator

ATTENTION WINDOWS USERS: Click and play version here. NO INSTALLATION REQUIRED. Download the .zip, unzip it, and double click the .exe.

After a bit of reflection on the best way to handle this, I’ve written a free computer program to help create finger or word drills for students and educators. The program has about 10 preset lists and allows you to create and load your own custom finger drills.

The video tutorial is here.

If you hate computers, I created about 10 drills using this program and I share them here.

For a quick text tutorial:

Download and install Python 3.
Get the program text at this location or this location. Copy and paste it into a notepad file.
Save the notepad file, preferably in its own folder by itself.
The program should say something like name.txt. If you don’t see the .txt, you need to look up how to show hidden file extensions.
Change that .txt to a .py. Double left click and the program will launch.
The black box will give you a series of 13 numbers and their corresponding “drill list.” You can enter the number of the category you want, or create your own custom list. At this time, custom lists only work properly if you use single words.
Once you’ve chosen a category or created a list, you choose the wpm and number of minutes. The program will then create a text file by multiplying wpm * minutes. AKA, 225 wpm * 10 minutes is like 2,000 words. If you enter a very large number here, it may cause problems, like a computer freeze. I would not advise entering more than 300 wpm for more than 300 minutes (90,000 words). As a matter of fact, do not do it.
Having a finger drill by itself is useless. You can use my transcript marker or Todd Olivas’s slasher to automatically mark the program for speed dictation.

Educators and students, if you have not already, feel free to check out the transcript marker and written knowledge test randomizer.

Stenotrain

So we came across Stenotrain for a second time around. Coincidentally it was already on our resource page. It is purportedly a US Legal company that trains stenographers. We were only able to pull up a couple of reviews on the program, and an article that shows they may have acquired it around January 2018. Unfortunately, as of writing, the full article is scrubbed and no archived article appears on our time machine today.

Let’s be clear: We’ve had some pretty not-nice things to say about US Legal in the past. We can honestly say that we are skeptical here. While the reviews we did find on Stenotrain were glowing, there were so few that it’s hard to get an accurate snapshot of what’s going on there.

There are two big reasons that companies acquire companies:

They believe it will make them money and want to provide a good service for a good return.
They want to mothball or dissolve the company to destroy competition.

Which one are we looking at here? I don’t know. Certainly it’s not mothballed or dissolved, but how many resources are put into that program versus what we have seen in terms of direct mailers and efforts to get digital reporters? These are questions only internal documents from those companies could answer for me, and until someone leaks that, I just won’t know. Hopefully we can take the glowing review or two I did see as a sign that this a serious and successful program going on right now. If you have anything to say about Stenotrain we encourage comments below. We have never censored a single comment on Stenonymous as of writing!

One thing is for certain though: We could use some entrepreneurs getting into the education business. I wrote recently about New York’s new process for creating a degree-granting institution. There’s no doubt that the startup costs are steep, but I think the best programs will come from those who look at such a challenge and say “so what?”

January 2020 Update:

It is apparent that Stenotrain has been dissolved or scrubbed from the internet. Its internet presence is basically nonexistent now, with my blog post being the number one Google result for it. I would say that this reinforces me feelings that US Legal is anti-stenographer, which is terrible not just for us, but the consumer. Please note that this article has been modified, the formatting was incorrect and displaying incorrectly for readers. It has been fixed as of January 2020.