Playing Detective


Did you ever play detective as a kid? I grew up playing/watching Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and reading Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown books, which admittedly were a bit before my time, but were some of the best reading material around, in my opinion. Doesn't everyone fancy themselves a gumshoe?

Once upon a time, my dad and I played actual detectives. I was probably 11 or so at the time, and we were out walking during the winter and somehow found a Wisconsin Heights High School class ring near our house in a snowbank.

There's Method(s) to My Briefing Madness

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Briefing on the fly is a very important skill that any court reporter or steno student needs to learn to be good at. It's essential for keeping up with speech above your current speed level. I think even Mark Kislingbury is a proponent of briefing on the fly. It's how he gets through his 300+ dictations, by briefing "gold bullion" as TKPWOUBL or whatever brilliant nonsense he might come up with.

To start off, what is briefing on the fly? It means you're making up a brief or phrase as you're writing for something that keeps coming up over and over, like a three-word place name or technical term or just a common word that you never thought to shorten before. There's a few methods, I'm sure, but I'm going to spell out a couple for you that I've been noticing I've been doing lately when creating new briefs.

More Free Steno Dictation

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Time for another update of the free audio dictation that's out there for stenography and other shorthand students to practice on the Internet. This round actually has speeds ranging from 70 to 110 words a minute, which is good because sometimes the lower speeds are harder to find.

This is a series of YouTube videos from 2011. Enjoy!

70 wpm

80 wpm

90 wpm

100 wpm

110 wpm