BECOMING A REALTIME COURT REPORTER
Can an Old Dog Learn New Tricks?
When I was in court reporting school, I was taught that once a stroke is ingrained in your fingers, it was hard to undo. I’m assuming this was emphasized to promote accurate practice or something. I don’t really know.
Then I went to work for Brown & Jones Reporting. When I first started out as a court reporter, I was unhappy with my “messy” writing, but I didn’t know how to go about changing it. I wanted to write cleaner. Jane told me about how she had changed her writing years ago in an effort to write real time. I was very impressed, but I scoffed at the idea at first, thinking it would be too hard to do. I figured Jane was just an exceptional writer and probably out of the ordinary. I thought, well, she may have been able to do it, but there’s no way I can. Then she suggested a pretty straightforward way to go about it. Basically, I just printed out a weekly list of things I wanted to change and taped it to my laptop. During my jobs, I would stare at the list. I would try and really THINK about what I was doing instead of just writing in auto pilot. She also told me to take the old way out of my dictionary and enter the new outline. That way, whenever I screwed up, I got instant feedback.
Even though the theory I learned in school was real time, a big thing for me that I wanted to change was I had been taught to write all my numbers out. Eleven was LEFN. Twelve was TWEFL, and so on. We were given the option of whether or not to use the number keys. I opted not to, and found that later on, I felt like I would be better off utilizing the number keys after all. It seemed much handier for dollar amounts and dates, et cetera. It was difficult to adjust to at first, but now I’m completely used to writing my numbers from the number bar. Once I mastered that change, I realized with the proper effort and attention, I could continue to make changes to my writing, no matter how big or small.
Obviously, changing anything about one’s writing is an individual, personal choice, but I guess the long and short of what I’m saying is no matter how or when we learned to write, we have the ability to keep honing our skill. Real time is definitely the future of steno, so I will continue to work on passing the real time test and becoming a certified real time writer. I am really lucky to work for a company that has so many talented writers that are such great role models.
Rachel Gwidt, Certified Wisconsin Court Reporter
Tags: Realtime, Self-Improvement
