5 ms·
I'm going to school right now to become a court reporter / stenographer. Basically, I type on a funny looking keyboard (http://www.acculaw.com/images/products/
by suby 15y ago
I'm going to school right now to become a court reporter / stenographer. Basically, I type on a funny looking keyboard (http://www.acculaw.com/images/products/display/stenograph%20diamante%20pink%20g.jpg http://www.acculaw.com/images/products/display/stenograph%20...) where you're not so much typing letters as much as you're typing sounds. So the word "talk", for example would be written "tauk", with each letter of the word pressed at the same time (if possible. Some words you need to come back for a second, third, or god forbid forth stroke).
You have to write at 225 words a minute in order to graduate, but some people are able to write at speeds of 300+ words a minute. If you look at the keyboard, the machine is separated into two halves. On the left half there are only 9 keys, but each letter of the alphabet can be written with those 9 keys because it's context sensitive. The letter "t" by itself would be the letter t, but if it's next to a "k", it might become the letter d. You mentioned that we can knock out certain letters such as c, and that's indeed what is done with stenography. The word "car" is written "kar". There are sometimes conflicts, like "sell" and "cell", so you still need a way to write a c, but that's the gist of it.
Worth mentioning is that there are only 4 vowel keys on the machine (the vowels are the keys that are on the bottom), but you can write a lot of different sounds with these four keys. A, O, E, and U are the vowels that are on there, and if you press one of those keys individually, you'd write a short vowel of that key. If you wanted to write a short I, you'd press E and U together. You would write long vowel sounds by combining different vowels together. So for example, if you wanted to write a long e sound, you'd write aoe, long U sound would be aou, long a sound would be ai (or aeu depending on how you look at it), long o is oe, and long i is all the vowels together at once.
It can be hard to read what you've written if you're not extremely good at it. The word dime, for example, you would see as "TKAOEUPL". There are a few different theories out there, and even if everyone learns the same theory, everyone puts their own little spin on it, so if you wanted to read what someone else wrote, it might be tough.
This is the layout of the keyboard if anyone is interested (http://dmc122011.delmar.edu/ba/crtrgallery/images/steno_keyboard_chart_jpg.jpg http://dmc122011.delmar.edu/ba/crtrgallery/images/steno_keyb...)
- Groxx 15y agoAs an outsider, I don't see why reading "TKAOEUPL" instead of "dime" would be an improvement (except for checking precisely what you wrote) for even professionals. Is there a reason why these machines don't convert the roughly-phonetic words into English words? I would think it wouldn't even be too hard to program, even with those 'little spin's, considering how far we've come with grammar checkers and gestural keyboards like Swype.
- javajosh 15y agoIt's funny how when someone on HN says, "My method works well, but there are some pathological cases, like X" someone else on HN will invariably reply with, "Yeah, but I don't see why X would be an improvement." This is a bad practice not only because it misrepresents the original thought (the person was not claiming that X was an improvement, they clearly called it pathological), but more perniciously it subtly erodes the (altogether sensible and honorable) habit of good people to give full disclosure of their ideas and methods. To put it simply: attacking someone on the weaknesses that they themselves have revealed about their own process or idea is neither fair nor useful, and does not contribute to the discussion.
- Groxx 15y agoIf it came across that way, I'm sorry - I'm genuinely curious why such machines don't convert what was typed into English. In the past it was almost certainly a lack of computational power (or zero) - what about now? I was only asking about the reading portion, the writing is pretty clearly faster. I'm not in any claiming that they should be typing on QWERTY. I'm wondering why the pathological case exists at all when it seems it doesn't have to, and if there's a reason for it that I'm not aware of. Maybe there's a market for machines like this to spit out English, maybe there isn't, but I'm not in the field so I really don't know.
- suby 15y agoAh, I'm sorry, I actually gave the wrong impression. On the machine I own, you can choose whether or not to have it display English, or what you've actually written, or a split screen with English on one side and what you've actually written on the other. Reading it in English isn't as ideal as you may think, though. I actually prefer reading the notes. The problem is that if you're writing at 225 words a minute, it can be very easy to accidentally leave off a letter, or add an extra letter to a stroke. The English might come up as come up as a completely different word, where as if you're reading what you've actually written, it can be a lot easier to see your mistake and read the correct word. For example, let's use the word Dime again. If I'm going at 225 and I accidentally add an "R" to the word dime, it'll look like "DRAOEUPL". In English, this would read "Did there come a time", where as if I were looking at my notes, it would be obvious to me that I intended for that to be "dime". If you're reading back at court, you don't want to make mistakes like that.
- bfrs 15y agodime going as "TKAOEUPL" reminds me of this: http://i.imgur.com/EFzu9.png http://i.imgur.com/EFzu9.png
- baby 15y agoI can write 225 words a minute with a normal keyboard. According to http://speedtest.10fastfingers.com/ http://speedtest.10fastfingers.com/ anyway.