A Brief Glimpse Into My World

Yesterday, I finally passed my last 120 WPM test in school, which means that next week I start my 140 WPM class.  That’s right.  I’m going to be practicing to write at 140 WPM.  Sound crazy yet?  It gets worse.  In order to be a CCR (Certified Court Reporter) I have to be able to write at 200 WPM, and in order to maintain that, my program gets us up to 225 WPM—the theory being that if you can do 225 WPM accurately, you can pass at 200 WPM.

Sound nuts?  It is.  And it’s frustrating, more than any outsider can understand.  I was told from the outset that the average for completion of the Court Reporting program is three to five years, which meant that I was looking at approximately four years if I went at the normal pace.  I could get my Bachelor’s and be on my way to a Master’s degree if I went back to college like a normal person.  At least in college, you know your schedule.  Court reporting?  No chance at that.  I get asked all the time how much longer I have in school and I have to say, “Only God knows.”

And it’s tough from the get-go.  You have a shorthand machine with a funky keyboard, and your first two days is memorizing what each key is.  This is the basic setup*:

            S T  P  H  * F P  L T  D
            S K W R  * R B G S  Z
                        AO EU

(*The S and * in bold represent the same key, which stretches vertically over the two rows of consonants.)

The letters to the left of the asterisk is for your left hand and they represent your initial consonants, those to the right (where your right hand goes) is for your final consonants, and the your thumbs handle the vowels.  The obvious question is: how does this make any kind of sense when court reporters write?

First, we learn the alphabet, and the alphabet is different for each hand.  For example, on the right side, you have a single key for the letter “D.”  However, on the left side, there is no key for “D,” so what we do is press “T” and “K” at the same time, and “TK” translates into the initial “D.”

With me so far?  Good.  And honestly, I’m impressed that you’ve made it this far into the post.  I usually lose people within the first two minutes of explaining the shorthand craft.

To help with the shorthand, single letters can represent entire words.  I use both “T’s” for that purpose; the initial “T” represents the word “it,” and “-T” represents “the.”

So, if I wrote the sentence, “The dog chased the cat,” it would come out in shorthand like this:

                                                  T
              TK              O           G
                 K      H  A   EU           S
                                                        D
                                                  T
                  K           A               T
                                      F P L T

The last stroke represents a period, just in case you wondered or cared.

Being able to write whole words and syllables in one stroke definitely cuts down on the time we spend writing.  On a normal QWERTY keyboard, I’m fairly fast.  Last time I tested my time, I could type at 80 WPM, but the thing is, I’m slowed down by the fact that I have to write one letter at a time.  On my shorthand machine, instead of going from letter to letter, I can go word to word in no time at all.

But that’s not even the most disgusting part.  Court reporters believe in shortcuts, and they create things we call “briefs” and “phrases.”  “Briefs” are taking words that are multiple syllables and writing it in one stroke, e.g. “pedestrian” can be written as “P*ED” on the shorthand machine.  That by itself can save you two seconds in dictation.

But it’s the phrases that really save you time.  This is when you write multiple words in a single stroke.  This,

                                      U R      T
                         PW   *E               S

translates as “You are the best.”  “You are the” was written in the first stroke.  And that is the gist of what court reporters study.

It’s exhausting, very tedious, and demands patience with yourself, because it will take a while not only to remember everything, but to build your speed and keep accurate.  Why do we do this to ourselves?  How did we choose this as a career path?  What’s the reason for it?

The money is good.

Okay, I’m sure there are those who started this program with dreams of performing a valuable service to the legal system and/or the deaf and hard-of-hearing community (court reporters are the ones who do closed captioning.)

But frankly, the overwhelming majority of the people I’ve met in school saw the salaries we can make, and they are nothing to sneeze over.  I’ll probably do a post explaining what got me into this sometime in near future, but mostly, I was excited that I got as far as I have today.  I’ve been in the program for barely more than a year, and already, I’m over halfway through.  I’m feeling good, and I figured, I might as well give you a taste about what it is I actually do during the daytime.