Let Them Eat Cake

After reading a fellow CR blogger's most recent post about The pros and cons of going paperless as a student, I was inspired to share with you how you can have your cake and eat it too prior to buying your first professional steno machine. Included in the wealth of steno knowledge known as Cheap and Sleazy is an article about a how to temporarily shorten your keystroke depth on your Stentura or similar machine, thus making it more like a professional machine.

I did this to my Stenograph Stentura 400 SRT, and it's made a world of difference! It's not as hard a procedure as it sounds, and I'm not mechanically inclined by any stretch of the imagination. I could tell almost immediately that it made a positive difference in my writing speed. If I had to put a quantitative number on it, I'd say it added 5-10 words a minute in speed after doing this. See full article for complete instructions.

And call me eco-girl, but I reuse my paper pads over and over unless I'm taking a speed test. Some people just remove their ink cartridges to go paperless, but it seems like the platen (AKA rubber roller) still is getting direct impact by the keys with that setup. Personal preference, I guess. And as I write this, I'm reminded that reading back notes is an essential part of solidifying your steno strokes, so after I'm done testing, I'll be saving the paper notes for future readback.