On the home page of CourtReportingHelp.com is a link to three free MP3 drills. I call them the Magic Drills. They are relatively easy to perform, but they will frustrate you at first.

Strictly follow the rules that are given for the drills. They address all of the problems that you can have, and they solve them for you very easily.

However before you begin the drills, it might be nice to run through the full list of steno problems that affect students.

The Terrible Triumverate of Joseph Kinaim, Anna Mae Tedley, Barb DeWitt and myself came up with four possible problems and their subsets: 1, Clarity; 2, Hesitation; 3, Carrying Words; 4, Editing (thinking about whether your last stroke is clear, rather than concentrating on the next stroke)

On my own, I came up with the three rules of stenography that will guarantee improvement in every writer: 1, You must have clarity; 2, Your hands must be moving at all times; 3, You must never drop any more than three words in any one place.

Those rules are simple and easy. They produce quality students who turn into quality professionals.

1. Clarity. If you aren't writing clearly, then you must slow down until you are writing clearly. Clarity should never be defined as anything less than 99 percent readable strokes. Your strokes should be as perfect as possible, but a readable stroke is a stroke that can absolutely be correctly translated without guessing. No dropped endings, no partial strokes, no ambiguous outlines.

2. Your hands must always be moving. Allow your hands to write slowly when they hit the hard strokes. Forcing them to write faster will fracture your clarity. Don't worry if the hands move slowly, but never ever ever let them completely stop.

3. Never drop more than three words at a time. Ignore how many words you drop. Concentrate only on how you drop them. Correct drops of one or possibly two words at a time indicate that the student is not trailing the speaker and consequently, is able to concentrate on the next stroke rather than on retaining a large string of words in their memory.

A large drop indicates that the student dropped those words because a failure of memory. The student was carrying so many words that the train of thought was lost. The words that are dropped are not the problem. The problem is that the student did not recognize that he/she was falling behind.

When you fall behind the speaker by five or six words, you have a hard choice to make. You must either write faster or drop a few words.

For the most part, writing faster is not a viable option. If it is possible to write faster, then you should have done that before you fell behind in the first place.

The hard choice usually entails dropping a few words. If you are good at dropping, then you should look for the biggest or most difficult word and drop that. If you have trouble dropping, forget about looking for the best word to drop. Just make sure that you drop before you fall seriously behind.

Stenography really isn't any harder than that, folks. You don't need 80 million rules. You don't have to learn a million briefs. You don't have to constantly drill at high speed.

Now, let's get back to the Magic Drills.

The rules for the Magic Drills are very simple.
1. All strokes at all times must be readable.
2. You must write at least two words in every four-word sentence.

If you do those things, you will have great clarity in your regular drills and you will learn not to fall behind the speaker.

Go to CourtReportingHelp.com and look on their home page for the Magic Drills. There are three of them. Read the explanation for each drill, and follow the two rules. It won't take you long before you see the results.

Take care.
Stephen Shastay