Tips for the Stenographer in Training

We started as a blog discussing issues for newbie reporters. In more recent times we’ve pushed this thing to encompass all kinds of issues, questions, and even political ideas. Perhaps it’s fitting to return, briefly, to the things that students can do to make their time in school more productive, less stressful, or even shorter. After all, the field needs new people, so logic tells us that efficiency in preparing and producing stenographers for the workforce is paramount.

Right out of the gate, let’s get one thing clear, respect perspectives. You will read things online and see things in the world that directly contradict what your teachers tell you. You will meet people that tell you that your teacher is wrong, or Stenonymous is wrong, or the world is wrong. Your newness to stenography may lead you to the conclusion that the most authoritative voice is correct. That way of thinking is an offshoot of the Might Makes Right logical fallacy, and may lead you down a hard road. Succinctly, take in opinions and asserted facts, but don’t draw too many conclusions. Everyone’s perspective is colored by their experience, and though our experiences may be similar, they are often quite different and can lead to wildly different advice.

With respect for what we just said, don’t be afraid to act. If you are so busy respecting other people’s perspectives that you never make any decisions, your progress will suffer. As an easy example, some reporters believe we must always use the number bar. Some reporters believe we must never use the number bar. You can respect both opinions. But in the end it is better for you to “pick a side” or develop your own method instead of trying to please everyone. Hesitation can make your job much harder than it needs to be.

Now for the good stuff. You want writing tips. That’s why you came. Here’s a look inside some common perspectives. Brief things you hear often. You may very well reach a point in your career where you are making 40,000 strokes a day with briefs. If everything takes two strokes, that’s more like 80,000 strokes. The amount of stress and strain on your hands is not a joke. Shorter writing can make you a faster writer.

Funny briefs work. You’ll remember them. It’s memorable. Just make them funny for you. It doesn’t matter if anyone else gets it. At one point in my own career every proceeding would start with the sections of law 240.30, 250.20. How long before they became TWAOEFT? Just to drive this point home, an old friend made up a brief for casino when we were in school a decade ago, SKWAOEPB. To this day, I remember it, and it doesn’t come up all that often at all in New York.

It’s better to write than lose. We’re expected to get pretty much everything in the working world. So if you have to make a choice between making a silly outline and dropping, write the silly outline. This can come in the form of condensed words (pseudo briefs) or even half words. For example, perhaps someone briefs “persuasive.” Finally, persuasive comes up — and someone doesn’t remember their brief. It’s okay to write “PER SWAEUF.” In some cases, it’s okay to write “PER.” For example, if the sentence is “The salesman was very persuasive when he sold me the car”, the only time you wouldn’t transcribe your PER as persuasive is if you don’t care or you’re not paying attention.

Testing with tactical drops. Most programs I’ve heard of count a missed word as an error, specifically one error. It doesn’t matter if the word is “Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia” or “hi.” So what happens, often, is students lock up or trip up on small words, and then a big word pops up, and all of it gets dropped or jumbled. So let’s analyze the fake test statement, “hi, my name is Joe, and I have had Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia since I was age 24 in 2018.” All things being equal, on test day, drop the big word and get all the little stuff. Those small words before the big one are potentially 9 errors. 9 errors versus 1. No contest. Please note, in the working world, you need the big words, but you also have the power to ask people to repeat themselves. Also, as a rider to the tactical drop, if you have to drop a word or punctuation while writing, drop the punctuation.

Practice fast. The whole point of speed building is being able to hear, process, and take down what you heard. Some practice slow and work on accuracy, and I hope that that works for them, but ultimately we are training our brains to hear the words and write with what educators call an “automatic response.” You want to be practicing at 10 to 20 words above your target speed. On that note, at least some of this has to do with muscle memory. Repetition is the name of the game. Don’t be afraid to take the same fast take over and over until you get it. Do that with enough takes, and your muscle memory becomes varied and fast over a wider variety of words. My take on slow practice? It’s working against you and training you to be slower. The only thing it might be good for is a confidence booster.

Know your numbers. It doesn’t matter if you use the number bar or not, you need to be very ready to hit numbers. Some of the most common numbers are years, and you should have easy ways to get those out. You can do funky things with the asterisk and lower letter keys to create creative number bar outlines, or you can create short forms. Everyone’s brain is different. Many people brief 2019 in one stroke. I do TWOEUPB TPHAOEPB. Yet with the 90s I do TPHAOEPB TPHAOEPB TPHAOEUPB, which translates literally to 19199, but because I defined it, comes up 1999. Three-stroke outlines are generally a no-no, but if you’re hitting it seamlessly, it hardly matters.

Try to practice interrupting. Worry about this one close to graduation. A lot of the tips so far have been about trying to get it or the tactical drop. Let’s touch on a working skill a lot of reporters don’t have practice with. The interrupt. In the working world there are folks out there that say just let the audio catch it. If you didn’t hear it, it may not be as clear as you think on that audio. So being able to interrupt is a valuable skill. If you have a family member or friend, see if they have time once a week or once a month to read to you. Ask them to read way fast every few pages so you can get a little practice with varying speeds and interrupting. Take note that how you ask can change outcomes. “I’m sorry, please repeat what you said” usually gets people to repeat exactly what they said. “What?” usually makes people expound on what they said or define what they said. Also note that interrupting is situational. Sometimes it makes sense to interrupt on the spot, and other times it makes sense to wait for a break to clarify names or spellings. No matter which way you shake it, how you do it matters. Be polite and professional.

Build your dictionary. There are two major schools of thought here. The first school is methodically go through and add outlines for stuff proactively from the dictionary or news. Another school of thought is to build your dictionary to the work that you do. Some people even maintain different dictionaries for different types of work. Succinctly, it doesn’t really matter what school you’re from, but you should always be adding stuff, with the understanding that anybody who’s taking the time to add stuff from Merriam Webster will have a larger and more complete dictionary.

Analyze misstrokes. If you have the same misstroke commonly enough, it’s either you or the machine. If you can’t get splits or stacks out of your writing, but they don’t conflict with anything else, just put it in. That misstroke that you fix manually every time just became a dictionary feature. In this same vein, if you have a close friend at school, maybe once every couple of months try transcribing each other’s notes. For one, it’ll teach you to read through “rough notes.” On the other hand, your friend may give you ideas that you wouldn’t have had by yourself.

Read back. Practice reading back out loud whether or not you have to do it alone. Practice reading back off notes and transcription. Read back is one of our important skills that we don’t get a lot of practice with. Speaking clearly is surprisingly helpful in matters of business, employment, and stenography. Your ability to speak well may not only affect on-the-job performance, but also whether or not you get a job at all.

Practice writing. At the very least, make sure you know how to compose polite, professional emails, a cover letter, a resume, and a rate sheet. We often like to assume we don’t need any help in this area, but as you have probably seen on this blog and from your fellow students, everyone makes mistakes, and practicing these functions before graduation will make you more employable.

Practice accents. A great deal of our training revolves around perfectly clear speakers at very high speeds. In the real world you may meet people that don’t speak particularly fast, but are not very clear speakers. The more time you get in school or training practicing this, the less difficult it will be during your work and the less likely you will make a critical mistake, such as misunderstanding testimony.

Create your own dictation. Are you having problems with a specific type of word? You can actually create a dictation tailored to the fingering problems you’re having. Get your creative writing on and take a few minutes to compose something, anything. Then you can even mark the thing for the speed you want. The manual way to mark for speed is to take your target speed and divide it by 4. That tells you how many words you need every 15 seconds. So 100 wpm goal divided by 4, you need 25 words every 15 seconds. Count 25 words, make a line. Then you time yourself reading with a stopwatch and hit your lines every 15 seconds. The automatic way to mark for speed is to use Todd Olivas’s Slasher. Alternatively, if you know anything about Python code, you can use my computer program. There are low barriers to creating your own dictation. Google has a stopwatch app and digital recorders can be as low as $50. Explained in more detail here.

Three chances to get it right. Our need to get it right is inviolable. A wise teacher said you’ve got three chances to get it correct, the writing, the transcription, and the proofreading. Countless working reporters skip that proofreading phase, and you may one day find yourself doing just that. That acknowledged, in your formative years and as you are learning, it will make you a better reporter to take that time to proofread your tests and early jobs. We make mistakes. It happens. We are new. The best way to identify mistakes is to take advantage of all the chances to get it right.

You are in charge of your destiny. We have been told by the arrogant that certain people are not fit to be a reporter, or that people over 30 cannot achieve high speeds. For some, this became truth. For others, this became a challenge. Determined reporters across the country have trained to do this. Whatever your issue, whether it be something you feel about yourself, or whether it be an inadequacy in your training, you can compensate and beat it. This is not meant to call anyone’s struggle illegitimate, but to point out that in the end the most likely descriptors of any endeavor are success or failure. Be a success. Everyone wants you to be a success and go on to help other people succeed, but it’s your action or inaction that’ll decide the outcome.

July 10, 2019 Update:

I came across this Doris Wong Blog and the Student Corner. Skimming it, it seems to talk about all kinds of things, and I agree with the writer on a lot of what they say.

WUNCRA, Knowledge Is Power, Spitballing Is Weak

Wake up, Wake Up NCRA?

It’s that time again to come out and talk about our friends at WUNCRA. Archived here. Though, begrudgingly, we’re going to have to bring out some harsh words. First the good stuff: We love information and we love rhetoric. We want an end to the secrecy that has damaged this field. We want the stenographic modality to be and remain the principal method of reporting nationally. There are legitimate things that Frank N Sense writes about, and we would like that to continue. We have made interesting connections and asked questions ourselves to specific people in the field, and we have had our concerns answered quickly. We want facts and knowledge whenever possible.

Our major problem with the way that Frank N Sense is doing business is that there is often nothing in the way of evidence. It devolves into mindless bullying and name-calling sometimes, as with the Lipstick on a Pig post. He or she denounces secrecy and wants there to be more open policies, but has a very closed gate when it comes to comments. Even in the post, which more or less accuses Stephen Zinone and his company of being an AAERT sellout, there’s a lot of words there, but there is not a single copy of this email. There’s not even proof that Stephen Zinone is a member of AAERT posted at WUNCRA, we had to find it ourselves. The author does not even offer Zinone’s full name, instead referring to him as Steve Z. The post fails to name the two or three past presidents allegedly going to the AAERT convention.

The site isn’t informing the reader what’s going on or what’s happened. This isn’t helpful to anyone who isn’t acutely aware of the immediate topic. It’s doing little more than leading its readers and followers down a dark road of negativity. We’ve hit this trap a time or two on Stenonymous where we expound on an issue that we haven’t explained for newcomers. Listen, none of us are perfect. But we need to face the truth: We have no idea where information is coming from post after post at WUNCRA. As a very astute reader told us about our own posts, without some facts and sources, it’s just words on the internet. We urge WUNCRA to put up this information every time instead of making us search for verification ourselves. This information-vacuum reporting is just a continuation of the old reporting zeitgeist of gatekeeping information. Worse still, there may be a troll at the gate. The writing is so one-sided and bleak that readers are left with hopelessness instead of solutions to move forward.

For the record, we reached out to Stephen Zinone. The response will be linked here. He rightly points out Frank’s trolling nature and explains a bit about what he’s doing. He uses steno reporters and QWERTY transcribers to provide for the consumer. He’s put out ideas about bringing down barriers to entry for steno. He makes an honest case for the fact that people who may have testing issues or inability to compete stenographically should still be able to make an income doing what they love. We believe stenography can remain the dominant method for taking the record, and should even be the only method, but there’s always likely to be at least some market share taken by the other ways. We on Stenonymous encourage stenographers to compete hard! We get the words in four or five times faster than the average typist, and have a rich history and institutional knowledge that goes unmatched by others. Even our most stinging articles against companies were not so much about the usage of recording itself, but the perceived pushing of recording over stenographers even when steno should be first. As best we can tell, Stephen Zinone isn’t doing that here.

I suppose we either will or won’t be convincing to Frank N Sense to release “more better” info in the future. Maybe we’ll convince some readers to think critically and ask questions. Maybe anyone feeling demoralized by Frank’s writings can look at this and feel ready to go out and make steno shine. We are sensitive to that writer’s position of being an anonymous person that may want to redact certain sources for any number of reasons. That admitted, we’ve had gripes in the past too. We are worried that this constant negative droning combined with the diminished effervescence of the status quo steno supporters are going to harm stenography more than help. In plain English: Offer up some real solutions or suggestions. We know you have that power to empower your audience. Give people ideas to fight and win.

In that vein, here is our own message to Zinone, Hunt, and any business owner who may be a steno ally but has decided to join AAERT to see how it might impact your business or shape the landscape: Pass us back some info. We’ll redact pretty much what you want. You can pass it through an email proxy, anonymous Imgur links, audio recordings, whatever makes you happy. But if you’re truly getting an understanding of these things and how they might impact the field, share that knowledge. Make us powerful. I’m sitting at ChristopherDay227@gmail.com. We’ll get the message out.

And to the NCRA: While we have a very different take on your message than Frank, and we don’t agree in breaking down what’s left and distributing it to members, we do think there are things to learn in terms of communication, outreach, and transparency, but you are off to a powerful start in 2019. Keep up the transformation. Don’t be afraid to admit past mistakes. Don’t be afraid to say here is a roadmap and our ideas for fixing XYZ situation. Perhaps even consider coming up with a few major initiatives, creating a board’s recommendation, announcing you’re doing all of this so people buy a membership so that they can vote, and then letting the membership vote direct on those initiatives. Make membership feel powerful, and I have a very strong feeling that membership will empower the organization. It’s a symbiotic relationship dependent on leaders solving the age-old question of how to motivate people to act. Specifically, how to get people to open the wallet and fund the future of steno legislation, education, and awareness.

To the newcomer: Welcome to the family. Steno is a huge field with a lot of opportunities. We’ve had some issues in that past leaders of steno and NCRA have thrown their support behind recording technology. Note that the NCRA’s bylaws state it is a promoter only of the stenographic medium of record making. Frank’s message is about exposing the fact that we may have obstacles to overcome. Let mine be about what you can do about it:

Join professional steno organizations. You matter.

Identify issues in your market and community.

Discuss these issues, propose solutions.

If the association is not helpful after a proposal, identify why they’re not helping. Suggest ways they can improve or identify ways to improve the proposal.

bylaws

Look at Stenonymous. It started as a stopgap to answer student questions and preserve information and has built up a following of hundreds. Lots to improve upon, but the point stands: If we could do this, anyone can do this, and if a lot of us take a stand, we will see an incredible renaissance in this field. Be a part of that!

An Explanation of Anticontracting

(And what’s just happened.)

We have covered many topics here. Things to consider putting in a contract, the importance of a contract, the importance of friends and allies. So it may come as a shock to many when we have a title about anticontracting, which I may just abbreviate to AC in this article.

To understand AC, let’s understand a few basic things about how money flows into reporting from the deposition/freelance side of things. Typically, people have lawsuits, those lawsuits start with a complaint, and if the lawsuit doesn’t die on a motion to dismiss, then the lawsuit continues to discovery. At discovery stage, documents are exchanged, and depositions are held. At those depositions, typically an attorney is questioning a witness, and having the answers recorded/reported/taken down by a court reporter/stenographer/fabulous individual. That’s where we come in, and typically how we get paid, via lawyer.

But there is a crucial piece missing. In many lawsuits, on one or both sides, behind the scenes, is an insurer. The insurer (insurance company) is a massive funder of litigation. In many cases, the lawyers are making some or all of their money from the insurer, so they are at least arguably a little beholden to them.

What has happened in many jurisdictions and states is that the insurer makes a deal with a court reporting company to have its lawyers use only that court reporting company. On the side of the stenographer, this really messes with our whole setup, because our entire self-employment model and being able to negotiate for higher rates is dependent on not handing over large swathes of business on the top end to one company. The firm that has all the work can force the stenographer to work for less pay than they might otherwise get if that work was spread out over multiple agencies or companies. So simply put, the idea that this shouldn’t be is anticontracting.

On the flip side, and as far as I know, the legal justification for anticontracting, the idea that these long-term insurer-reporting relationships shouldn’t exist, it unfairly forces litigants to be part of a contract they are not a party to. When one hires a lawyer, one gets a retainer agreement that spells out rights. One such right can be to hire one’s own court reporting firm if a case goes to depositions. Insurers, dependent on the state and circumstances, may even have an obligation to allow the insured to choose the insurer’s attorney instead of their appointed lawyer. So why in the world would we ever have these big box impenetrable contracts that lock an insured into using a reporting service?

So what has happened in the world of AC? For as far back as I can remember, our National Court Reporters Association, NCRA, had a legal justification for and supported AC. Well, as things go, in more recent history they have fallen silent on AC. As far as one can tell, they even purged information about AC from their website. This is coming out at a time when Virginia has just become the next state to push for anticontracting, and win, which honestly gives a little more weight to fiery rhetoric which I previously believed to be invalid.

So what’s the next step? If you’re a New Yorker, or even if you’re not, it might be time to join your state association. It might be time to make the push for AC in New York. It might be time to organize your families and friends and ask your elected officials to act. Life is a series of decisions, and if your decision is to sit on the sideline and see who wins, you may just be boxing yourself into a limited future income, because if the big companies can monopolize the deposition reporting world de facto, you can be damn sure that when they’re done they’ll head right on into CART, captioning, and courtrooms. So I say the time to be involved is right now, and it’s looking like a serious case of stand together or be hanged separately.

Edit on June 29, 2018. This post was first made in March 2018. In April 2018, NCRA released a statement about contracting. I feel very conflicted because I was an NCRA member from the second I started making money reporting all the way to now, but I can’t run away from my gut feeling. And my gut feeling is the message is the same: “Oh no, no, no, it’s not that we don’t support anti-contracting, it’s just that we won’t provide public testimony about it. It’s not that we purged our website of anti-contracting stuff, it’s that on such and such date the board didn’t approve the thing of such and such date.” Quite frankly, it’s a game. It’s the liar’s this/that trap. Basically if someone accuses you of anything, you say “that’s not what happened.” “It didn’t happen that way.”

It’s a strange phenomenon for me. I often have a hard time gaining people’s trust because I try to go the extra mile for people, it brings up people’s guard. And just maybe that’s what’s happened with the NCRA, maybe they’re trying to go the extra mile and it’s thrown up my guard. But maybe not.