Value Gradients for the Stenographer in Training (180+ WPM)

In this article we’ll get down to the different kinds of services offered by freelancers and some officials. This’ll be for the benefit of the relatively new and uninitiated. If you’ve already obtained some mastery over the basics of steno industry or if you’re brand new, this really won’t be for you because you already know about it or are just too new to be worrying about it. I say if you’ve completed 80 percent of a 225 words-per-minute program, 180 WPM, this is probably a worthwhile read.

So there are different things in this field that add value to your work as a stenographer. While we can’t necessarily get behind the subjectivity theory, value is, to a great degree, subjective. This means that simple things like writing a professional cover letter, resume, or contract pitch can make you, at 180 WPM, more valuable than a person who can get 225 WPM but can’t really nail the grammar on anything. Consider the first gradient in your whole career to be learning to write professionally, and always look to improve that writing.

Then we get to the simple things offered by stenographers that pull in more money, typically called upcharges. Often markets are different, and “employers” may even tell you that “they don’t pay for that.” This is a tactic to get you more comfortable with doing the work for less. If there are more stenographers willing to do the work for less, the “employer” has leverage over the stenographers that know about these upcharges, and can bypass them and have you do it for less money. Work smarter, not harder, and consider asking several reporters in your market about the types of upcharges they get. Here are some common ones: Medical testimony, expert testimony, video testimony. Some charge up to 5 percent more for late night work. Some even add an interpreted testimony fee to make up for the time lost to interpreted depositions, which are often fewer pages per hour.

Related to what we just went into is confidence. There is a level of unease that comes with being new. You will probably be pressured to take jobs for less than they are worth. Immediately out of training, it’s agreeable to take all you can get. That said, after a couple of months, after you’re used to getting the transcripts out and doing the work, have the confidence to talk to some other reporters in your market and learn more about what’s expected locally. Don’t talk to one or two — talk to as many as you can. One reporter may say don’t get out of bed for less than a thousand. Another reporter may say hey, if you can rack up 6 busts in a day, it’s okay money for zero work. Have the confidence to take all the different types of jobs just mentioned. In my “class” of reporters there was a very strong fear about taking medical testimony. It had been hyped up as this impossible thing. To be clear, medical words can be unique or difficult, but having the confidence to go out there and do it makes you a better writer with the marketable trait of being able to take any kind of job. There is value in a person that can be sent to any type of job.

Let’s touch on some more common upcharges. Expedite. What is an expedite? That depends. When I started, a “regular” was 2 weeks. Anything quicker was some kind of expedite. Of course the rule follows: The faster they want it, the more they should pay. Nowadays, agencies are pushing people to make 7 or 5 days the regular. In my mind, this is much too short, and it devalues the worth of an expedite. It’s what people who play strategy games would call “a stupid move.” That said, if you can get your work out faster than “regular”, that adds value.

Daily. What’s a daily? You take the job, go home, transcribe, and the job is done by the next day. If you can do a daily, again, there’s value there. Not every single stenographer or transcriber can fulfill a daily. Indeed, to fulfill a daily, multiple transcriptionists have to be put on the same job sometimes. If you can do a daily, you can probably make a thousand or more dollars in a day without being realtime because daily jobs can be worth double a regular in freelance.

Immediate. Immediate is basically you finish the deposition and within 30 minutes to an hour it is ready to go out. The bottom line is the client is getting the transcript pretty quick after the deposition ends. Only the best reporters with 99.9 percent accuracy or a phenomenal scopist behind them can achieve these kinds of levels.

Rough. Rough is basically you go through the untranslates and fix up the transcript before sending it out with the understanding the finished transcript comes later. A rough can be a dollar or more per page in upcharges because it’s basically like an easier immediate. Proceed with caution: Many reporters go out there and produce roughs that are basically unusable. Some of my own roughs have been pretty bad. Always seek to improve and get out the best roughs so that lawyers are encouraged to use this service.

Realtime. Maybe you’ve heard of realtime reporting. It’s among the largest upcharges because these reporters have their words coming out on a laptop or tablet screen for the client. I haven’t personally done realtime, but I know that these reporters can command a dollar or more per realtime hookup on top of their daily, medical, or other upcharges. Why are these upcharges important? More money per page equals fewer pages to make the annual income you want to make. We’ve got over 900 mathematical calculations to show this off.

Now that we’ve been through these different levels of skill, let’s look at how it’ll apply in the real world. Certifications exist, and they are important. That said, in many states and municipalities you can offer these services without the certification. What does this mean? It means that the limiting factor is you. It’s your skill and comfort level. It’s your willingness to go out there and say yes, I will take a medical. It’s the desire to get your skill level to a place where you can realistically offer these things. Your value, to a great degree, is dictated by you.

You will go out there and have bad jobs. There will be hard days. There will be times you feel shaky about the service you’re providing. There will be “employers” who make you feel replaceable. Just keep improving. Know where you are at. Be open to feedback, but don’t live by it. Learn from every mistake. If you are in training and know you are able to produce a daily transcript already — great! Don’t let anybody take that away from you. Don’t accept, as fact, that anybody can do it or that nobody charges for that. The freelance world — the business world — is a tough one. There are buyers and sellers, and the buyers will always be looking for a way to knock you down on the price. Remember these gradients in value, and remember that the more of them you achieve, the more you have something to sell.

There Is No Rebel Alliance

We’ve got a natural leader on the field. There are a lot of leadership styles, but two very prominent ones are those who want to lead, my way or the highway, and those who do not want to lead but know that speaking out is the right thing to do. We think we’ve got the latter! We came across a California blog, SoCalReporters, that does pretty much what we do and brings forward important issues related to steno. And we’d go so far as to say the author(s) behind SoCalReporters are needed natural leaders! The post zeroes in on Veritext, but we all know they’re not the only ones. Sounds like a Sam Smith song.

In the blog post There Is No Evil Empire, the author explores how many Veritext-owned companies there are. The post goes on to say: Have you worked with those companies? That’s okay — we have too! And this is a fine example of what we often try to impress upon people, it doesn’t matter where you work, but the deal you make for yourself and the impressions you give potential clients matter a lot. The post moves into suggestions for what to do with regard to the shortage. Notably:

Stop destroying each other over where we work and start building each other up.
Talk to each other about the issues.
Create alternatives. The writer notes video depos and remote steno appearances in California may not be legally possible for the reporter. In New York, they are possible under specific circumstances. If I could’ve taken depos via video from a satellite office in Brooklyn or Staten instead of White Plains or Long Island, I would’ve saved dozens of hours of my life from the commute. These are possibilities worth exploring.
Picking up clients. The blogger eloquently sets forth that it might be time to reconsider how we market ourselves and that this is a great time to market ourselves. Make people feel good, and the money’ll be rolling in.

Believe it or not, No Evil Empire is very much the kind of thing we need a this point. Whether or not you believe these big box companies to be the Evil Empire or not, you have to admit that the salient theme of working together to propose solutions is paramount.

We are proud each and every time a reporter breaks the silence and seeks to introduce their ideas. It happens on Facebook. It happens on blogs. It happens through associations and submissions to the JCR. It’s happening all over the place. And it happened on February 9, 2019. All that is left is for us to organize these efforts and ideas into a coherent strategy. And let’s face it, whether or not you believe there is a rebel alliance, you surely see the merits of working together to solve perceived problems in the field.

Keep writing, keep leading, keep reading, keep learning.

Creating a Degree-Granting Institution in New York

Over two years ago I had written New York State to learn about how to legally establish a degree-granting college in New York. At that time there was not a process to do so in New York State. Now an application process has opened up and the application may be found here.

Succinctly, we will benefit from New York Stenographers being aware that they can apply to create degree-granting institutions. While I am a staunch supporter of all forms of stenographic learning, I made my way through a brick and mortar, degree-granting college, and received my Associate’s Degree in Occupational Studies, Court Reporting.

We will benefit from entrepreneurs getting together and reinventing how we teach this thing. We will benefit from schools offering financial aid to students that need it. Though this information is only a small piece of a complicated puzzle of how to open a successful school, I do hope it reaches people who have interest in perhaps designing programs of their own and building a better environment for students. At the very least, we’ll have more colleges reaching out to high school students and informing them this is a career option.

For-profit colleges are a tough market, often dependent on the employees they hire to remain in compliance with federal aid requirements and subject to scrutiny from the public. Perhaps now that New York State has opened up this application process we can see more dedicated professionals work on this issue and secure funding for schools that make programs as great as Plaza or New York School of Court Reporting. Perhaps institutions that are currently operating will take steps to grant degrees if they do not already.

For better or worse, in my experience, parents and students consider degree-granting institutions more legitimate and are more likely to put time and money into career-building if an institution or school provides a degree. Though New York currently has no educational or professional bar to becoming a stenographer, there is definitely a social stigma attached to having no degree that we cannot ignore if we hope to attract more students to this wonderful profession.

NYSCRA Certs Waive Provisional Assessment for NY Courts

NYSCRA President Nancy Silberger announced on December 13, 2018 that holders of the NYSCRA (New York State Court Reporters Association) certs ACR (Association Certified Reporter) and RCR (Realtime Certified Reporter) will be able to skip the provisional assessment for the state court test. This happened thanks to the work of Debra Levinson. I had written in the past about the value of associations, and today I can honestly say that the value of a NYSCRA membership has increased.

To put it in plain language: Every one to four years there is a civil service examination for the court reporter title and a statewide civil service examination for the senior court reporter title in New York State Unified Court System. Senior court reporters work in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, which is the “highest” trial court in the state. Court reporters work for the other “lower” trial courts, criminal, civil, or family courts. Passing the civil service examination is what gets you a permanent position with the New York State Unified Court System. Sometimes, and as a matter of fact right now, there are provisional postings for titles where people may apply for and take an assessment test to work provisionally in a title. Working provisionally allows people to begin accruing vacation time, sick time, comp time, and I believe it also leads to time in the title and pension. Basically if you are waiting for a permanent position to open up, the provisional posting is your way in. What NYSCRA has done is made it possible for you to get the provisional position in the court reporter title without the assessment test. You already passed a test, so why take it again? So if you can pass NYSCRA’s NYACR or NYRCR, you don’t have to pass the provisional examination to get a job with the NYSUCS right now. What’s better than that?Join NYSCRA. Propose great ideas like this one, and watch the association work to make NY reporting better year after year.

Practice Does Not Make Perfect

Inspired today to write a little about the pitfalls of poor practice habits. It is no secret that it takes practice, and a lot of it, to become a stenographer. Dedication, time management, and perseverance when faced with crushing failure or frustration are all things that come to mind when we think about practice.
But we who have done it can tell you that practice does not make perfect. Others have tried to describe this truth by saying perfect practice makes perfect. The concept is simple: When you have set a goal, ensure you are doing the things that lead to that goal. Analyze and know yourself, your habits, and decide what must be worked on the most.

Imagine that you are a beginning student whose goal is to hit various combinations of keys quicker and more accurately. In such a case, finger drills may be an appropriate use of your time because they are allowing you to familiarize yourself with the keys and combinations, and be more effective at hitting strokes on your early test. Now imagine you are a court reporter applying for a position in a court where there is a high volume of cases and the judges talk very fast. Finger drills are less helpful in such an instance because you do not need to be better at your stroke combinations, you need more speed and endurance. Only fast takes for moderate lengths of time can really help. Finally, imagine you are looking to be a captioner. Writing ultra fast or writing for long periods of time may be helpful, but ultimately it may be that your goal is to hear the words, take down the words, and have them come out on screen perfectly. For such practice, the answer may not be speed takes, but literally listening to the television, taking it down, and building your dictionary word by word.

Then there is another important factor for all of us to consider. Even if you have come up with a great method of practice: Despite some similarities,!our brains are all very different, and we all have different learning styles. Though court reporting/stenography clearly favors auditory and tactile learners over visual ones, you should consider what learning style you truly are and how you might work that into your practice. Are you a visual learner? Flash cards might be your thing. Are you an auditory learner? Listening to dictations over and over might be your path to victory. Are you a tactile learner? Maybe you just need to spend more time stroking the keys, with or without dictation, to get your fingers to glide without hesitation from one word to the next during the actual job or test.

This is all to say: Practice will not make you a great writer. You must know yourself. You must be willing to look at what everybody else does, incorporate what works for you, and discard all else. We have seen brilliant writers come out who focused primarily on finger drills, and we have seen writers just as brilliant that despised finger drills and never ever practiced one if they had a choice. You must be willing to learn who you are and how your mind makes connections. We can only urge each other and ourselves to choose a goal, and work backwards from that goal to figure out how to get there. If you want to make good transcripts, your writing is not required to be 100% accurate but you will need to practice transcribing time. If you want to caption for a large national event, you will need to be pretty close to 100% accurate and will need to focus on practice that forces you to stroke things out and build your dictionary.

There is a place for every dedicated reporter in the Reliable But Unremarkable Stenographic Legion. Practice won’t make you perfect, but with the right practice, you will achieve your goals and find success in this field.

Audio Transcription, Pricing, And You

First and foremost, happy Thanksgiving. As with most great writers, I’m going to take the time away from preparing to the holiday to write about something I know everybody will want to read about: Audio transcription and pricing. As stenographers, we tend to get very focused on a per-page pricing structure. This often leaves us trying to measure our time by pages, and is not always the most ineffective way of being paid.

For purposes of this post, let’s talk a little about CART, audio transcription, and pricing generally. CART and audio transcription are not the same thing, but they have similarities. One key similarity is that they tend to charge by the hour. For CART it’s per hour of writing, usually with a set minimum, and for audio transcription it’s money per hour of audio, sometimes prorated for audio that doesn’t last a whole hour or end exactly on an hour.

Succinctly, for CART, captioning, and audio transcription, despite having different prerequisite skills, the pricing for all of them must take into account the amount of work we’re doing, the quality of the work we’re doing, and ultimately the time it will take us to do the work. So speaking strictly for transcription: I’ve guesstimated that it takes me approximately one to two hours for every hour on the machine to transcribe with pretty close to 100% accuracy. That means for every hour of audio, there are about three hours of actual work involved. So, for me, honestly, working for less than $30/hr becomes painful, so the transcription deal isn’t sweet until maybe the $100-something range. The bottom line of this story? We must examine our time and really decide what it’s worth.

In examining our time, we can also consider other factors. For example, what are other people charging for the same work? As we can see from this Google search here, there are companies that boast a $1/minute transcription fee. So if we do an independent assessment of our time, and we come to the conclusion our time is worth $2/minute, that’s perfect, but just bear in mind that we may lose a couple of customers to the person who is half our price. A potential solution? Split the difference and charge $1.50 per minute.

There’s a lot that goes into economics, buying, selling, demand, supply, and no one blog post could ever impart all of that knowledge on anyone. Even top economists who have devoted their lives to understanding value and money disagree with each other. The best we can do is urge every reporter, where applicable, to look at what they charge, whether charging an agency, lawyer, or outside consumer, and consider how our pricing practices affect all different areas of the field. There’s tons of literature and articles on price matching and how it can help consumers, hurt consumers, help businesses, and hurt businesses, and the cold truth is that it’s up to us to take the time out and learn about these things, because many of us are our own business, and our business rises or falls on our willingness to learn beyond the machine.

E-mails and Communication

The Lazarus Horse.

Heard of beating a dead horse? That’s probably how most feel about my endless advice on seemingly mundane topics. But some horses come back to life, and so, the time comes to address an issue once again. We must stress the importance of writing coherently and clearly. We all fall into the pit of typos and/or iPhone touch disease, and it’s not the biggest deal in the world to make a mistake. That said, when you are composing an e-mail or sending any kind of information to anyone, especially a potential employer, mentor, or someone in the same line of work as you, it makes good sense to proofread the missive and make sure that it accurately conveys what you want it to say.

As an example: Couple of weeks ago a friend of mine was having some kind of exchange about testing in his line of work. The person writing my friend wrote something along the lines of “bus the ny test.” Simply put, we have no way of knowing why that message went out or what it meant, but we do know that it looks really silly. And in the eyes of people that are looking at potentially employing you for a job that has to do exclusively with typing words correctly, such mistakes can be fatal to any prospective employment.

So, a few common tips for getting through the day without e-mail blunders:

Take a pause and reread things prior to sending.
Consider whether any terms you use in the correspondence are ambiguous or likely to be misread.
Consider the connotation of your words. It is generally a bad idea to offend someone you plan to work for or with. As an extreme example, telling someone they are fat and should join your new gym is basically the same message as telling someone that you have just started working out at this amazing new gym and that they should give it a try. If a message must be sent, consider how the other person will read it.
Spellcheck your communications. Google Docs offers a spellcheck if your e-mail service and/or browser does not.

The best way to get good at something is to practice it. Many say that they needn’t worry about proofreading personal e-mails and that they are professional and careful when it comes to business e-mails. Unfortunately, if you spend 90% of your time writing like garbage, and 10% of it writing beautifully, that 90% of your muscle memory and bad habits will always be trying to creep into your 10% of beautiful writing. Try the alternative. Build good habits and write with purpose. Practice consistently and you will see improvement on and off the job.

Freelance Loyalty

Loyalty to the Highest Bidder.

Very often we see reporters who have been given a start in this field by an agency that subsequently feel indebted to the agency. They feel loyal to the agency, or they feel that they must abide by the agency’s desires to get work.

Truthfully, we are independent contractors, and we must be in business for ourselves. If an agency has told you that you should not work with others, you are under no obligation to listen or feel obligated to do that unless you have signed a contract stating that. And you should not sign such a contract unless it has considerable benefits for you, like a guaranteed six-figure salary. Further, you should understand any contract that you sign, and if you do not understand something, you should read it over with a confidant, mentor, lawyer, or even ask the company to clarify or change terms in the contract that you do not understand.

With that out of the way, many situation arise where reporters feel bad about saying no to agencies. One such situation is where you’ve given Company A your availability but Company B has offered you work. Generally, unless Company B has a bad habit of cancelling, ask Company A for a guarantee or take that job from Company B, because if you do not, you may be left with a big, fat zero on how much money you make that day. When we freelance, we must minimize the number of big, fat zeroes on our cash flow statements to maximize our profits and success regardless of whether we keep those statements on paper or in our heads.

Bottom line? You can use the words “yes” and “no” strategically. If you are pretty sure a job is to be more hassle than it’s worth, you are free to say no. If you are pretty sure saying yes is helping the company out of a bind, and they’ll remember that and throw a little more work your way when times are slow, yes might be a better answer. The thing we must be emphatic about is that the answers given should always unequivocally benefit the freelance reporter. There is a time and a place for altruism, and it is typically not in business. Altruism in business will burn you out and rob you of our livelihood. If that occurs, you will not be able to help anyone, and nobody wants that.

Be loyal to yourself. Do great work for the people and companies you work with or for. Identify what needs to be working better for you and work towards that. With you at the helm steering yourself in a direction you want to go, you cannot go wrong. It is only when others are allowed to influence your decisions that you begin to make decisions that can slow your professional progression or even hurt your career.

Cultural Literacy

The Philosopher King.

Plato once surmised that evils would never cease until either philosophers became kings, or kings became philosophers. Aristotle disagreed, and in sum and substance countered that it was not merely unnecessary for a king to be a philosopher, but even a disadvantage. A king should listen to the advice of true philosophers. In doing so, he would fill his reign with good deeds, not merely good words.

We may apply such ideas to today’s world, and consider the various specializations that people have when we weigh their words against what we know or believe. I had the good fortune of having a discussion with a reporting educator months ago, and today I am reminded of the wise words that educator gave me. I came to that educator with a simple question: Would reporting students graduate faster if not required to complete prerequisites such as math or English? I was countered profoundly with the following answer: The educator felt that students were not deficient in math or English to a troublesome extent. Rather, the educator felt there was deficiency in civics, current events, and cultural literacy. The educator saw students as not only being deficient in those areas, but resistant to learning in those categories.

I was quite surprised. Though my actual question went unanswered, I was given a nugget of insight that no one else in seven years of reporting had ever given me. The education and subsequent career of a reporter can be hampered not by the layout or style of the education, but by the student’s resistance to learning. By closing our minds, we close doors on ourselves.

What can we do about this? Perhaps the answer is to explore and practice to a wider variety of dictation. Personally, I have always believed that the magic of our job is mastering the material we hear the most, and to that end, mindless repetition of the same words and phrases can be important. But then I am reminded of a recent RPR webinar and prep class with dictation by Joshua B. Edwards, where he read from a monologue wherein the speaker spoke about describing America in one word. Much to my surprise, at only maybe 150 to 180 words per minute, there was some difficulty in keeping up, because the verbiage was so wildly different from what I hear on a daily basis.

Needless to say, but I will say, I am inspired. I am strongly considering finding insightful and varied material in my spare time and dictating it at random and/or variable speeds. If it helps one person open their mind to a new concept or idea, that’s important. If it helps many, that’s even better. Keep an eye out at my Youtube channel for future updates.