Writing clean is a good goal for court reporters.  When you are a student and increasing your speeds, you may not always be able to write cleanly.  As a reporter, when the speed in the deposition or courtroom increases, clean writing is much more difficult to sustain.  Once you are no longer a new reporter, you have time to concentrate on writing theory once again.  This is a good time to begin adding to your brief forms.  Developing your own strokes for common phrases decreases the number of strokes you are writing, and slows down the pace of strokes.  This allows you to be more deliberate in your writing and begin seeing less areas you need to edit when you begin transcription.

Here are some resources you may want to take advantage of if you are working on your writing and brief forms:

NCRA Database and Tips

If you decide this is the area of proficiency you want to work on, you don’t have to go it alone. The National Court Reporters Association offers a database of briefs contributed by working court reporters.  This database is a treasure trove of good briefs organized by categories such as numbers, prefixes, punctuation and more.  Anyone can use this NCRA Database to gather new brief forms.

NCRA also provides the following tips for learning and using briefs: 

• Do not use briefs if they do not fit within your theory or they will cause conflicts.
• Test a new brief against your dictionary. If it conflicts, don’t use it.
• Practice writing the brief or phrase many times before implementing it.
• Put the new outlines in a job dictionary until you’re sure you want to use them forever. Then put them in your personal dictionary.
• Having a brief for a term does not mean you’ll understand the term when it is said, remember the outline to write it without hesitation, or write it without fingering errors.
• Use a brief when the word/phrase is frequent or you frequently misstroke it.
• Don’t use a brief that creates fingering errors.

Briefs Dictionary

If you’re looking for a dictionary of brief forms, you may want to pick up a copy of Laurie Boucke’s book, “Brief Encounters:  A Dictionary of Court Reporting.” The publisher, White-Boucke Publishing describes this reference book as follows:

“A professional dictionary of approximately 64,000 conflict-free, mainly one-stroke briefs and phrases for realtime writing. It is an invaluable tool for reporters and students. The briefs are compatible with common writing theories and are easy to remember. The dictionary contains general vocabulary, as opposed to specialized terminology. It includes irregular verbs, the principal parts of all verb entries, arbitraries, punctuation, homonyms, special characters and more.”

Court Reporters Who Share

The internet has given court reporters a platform on which to share ideas. Some reporters share brief forms and tips on writing speed and practice. Here are just a few places you can find briefs from court reporters:

• Court reporter, Robin Qualy, lists briefs on her Twitter page.  It’s been a while since Robin has added to her list, but you can still find dozens and dozens of good briefs in her Twitter stream.  Find Robin on Twitter @RobinQualyCSR.
• Elsie Villega, a court reporting student, has her own website, “I love Steno”, where she lists new briefs she is learning and using.  There may be some here that might work for you too.
• Court Reporter Keith Vincent from Texas offers a PDF file filled with hundreds of short ways of writing words in steno. His list is made up of shortcuts contributed by him and other court reporters.   Keith says on his website, “I think this is an area where steno writers can help each other. So I’m creating a “Steno Tips” section of this website.”  The PDF is free to download.

Making a concerted effort to add to your list of common brief forms you use will lead to cleaner writing for you in the future.  Clean writing can make your life so much easier when reading back and transcribing.  The time you spend practicing and adding brief forms to your steno vocabulary now will pay large dividends into the future.

If you found this article interesting, you might also like “4 Excellent Online Grammar Resources for Legal Professionals.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Susan Kay is a Co-Founder and Co-Owner of Brown & Jones Reporting, Inc. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Google+.

Tags: court reporters

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