Hallelujah

 (This post contains affiliate links.)

(Source)

The song Hallelujah in the video below has a special place in my heart. It has such a beautiful and captivating melody! This is subtitled with Amara, a free Web based program for captioning videos, and the captions can be toggled on and off with the CC button located near the slider. I tried subtitling with Amara, and it was easy to work with and goes quicker the more familiar with the keyboard shortcuts I get and with the use of a foot pedal recently acquired at a second-hand store.

What a good song to practice steno to!

Play the (Virtual) Piano With Your Steno Machine

Before court reporting school starts back up on Monday, I thought I'd share with you one last piece of CR fun as a tribute to the quickly disappearing summer. I think a lot of steno people are either musicians, have played instruments in the past, or can be deeply moved by a piece of music. That said, here's one way we can get in touch with our musical side while putting some time in on the steno machine.

For those of you running Eclipse, go into your user settings (ALT-U) under the Realtime tab and click "add" before starting a realtime file.  From there, select "Keyboard macro" in the output format drop-down box. Make sure under Comm device that the COM port coincides with the port your steno machine is plugged into. Use the setup button and click on device manager if you're not sure which port you're using. (Not running Eclipse? Check your help file to see how to activate the keyboard output.) For CaseCatalyst, it's called Stenokeys and DigitalCAT, it's CatNip.

Now here comes the fun part: Go to Virtual Piano and once it's loaded, click "Enter" to start it up. Click on the keyboard. By writing different words and/or letter combinations, you can hear chords and notes as you practice word lists, finger drills, etc. Experiment, have fun, and try out different alphabets and outlines!

Let it Be
(Use your small letter alphabet for this. For me, it's the left side letter plus the asterisk key.)
1wtu 1wtu 5wry 5wry 6etu 6etu 5wry
4eti 4eti 1wtu 1wtu 3wru 5wry 5wry
4eti 3wru 2etu 1wtu

6etu 6etu 5wry 5wry 4eti 4eti
1wtu 1wtu 1wtu 1wtu 5wry 5wry
4eti 3wru 2etu 1wtu


For more songs, including Fur Elise (that one's fun!) and A Whole New World, click on Main Menu and then Music Sheets. One could probably even create a separate dictionary file with strokes representing actual chords. Maybe someday steno music could even become a new kind of competition at state and national conventions! Hey, dream big, right? ;)

The 10,000-Hour Rule

(This post contains affiliate links.)

As promised in my previous post, here's some wisdom gained from an awesome book I read. Outliers by Malcom Gladwell explains how, with a certain amount of innate talent, preparation, and oftentimes extraordinary opportunities, the most successful people in their respective fields, such as Bill Gates and the Beatles, got to be that way. I believe we can apply these very same principles to the world of court reporting. I highly recommend reading this book when (and if) you get some downtime in between practice sessions.

In Chapter 2, "The 10,000-Hour Rule," Gladwell refers to a study in which violin students were separated into three groups by their professors. Those three groups were labeled the "students with the potential to become world-class soloists," "those judged to be merely good," and then "students who were unlikely to ever play professionally." The following is an excerpt from this best-selling book:

All the violinists were then asked the same question: over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practiced? Everyone from all three groups started playing at roughly the same age, around five years old. In those first few years, everyone practiced roughly the same amount, about two or three hours a week.  But when the students were around the age of eight, real differences started to emerge.  The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, sixteen hours a week by age fourteen, and up and up until the age of twenty they were practicing -- that is purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better -- well over thirty hours a week.  In fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice.  By contrast, the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just over four thousand hours.

  

Ericsson and his colleagues then compared amateur pianists with professional pianists.  The same pattern emerged.  The amateurs never practiced more than about three hours a week over the course of their childhood, and by the age of twenty, they had totaled two thousand hours of practice.  The professionals, on the other hand, steadily increased their practice time every year, until by the age of twenty they, like the violinists, had reached ten thousand hours.

The striking thing about Ericsson's study that he and the colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did.  Nor could they find any "grinds," people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks.  Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works.  That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2008). Outliers. Little, Brown and Company. pp. 38-39. ISBN 9780316017923

We, as court reporting students, have been given an extraordinary opportunity by just learning about this awesome profession, and perhaps by being enrolled in a quality school with teachers who care or knowing fellow students who support you in your quest. Now you may say, "Hey, but I didn't start court reporting when I was five years old. How will I ever get to reach the 10,000-hour mark before reaching retirement?" 

The answer is that the 10,000-hour mark represents the top of our profession, the NCRA speed contest champions, the realtime champs, the fastest and brightest of our field. We want to strive to be "world-class soloists," and to do that we must put our heads down and just put in the time and dedication. We can very well become certified, working court reporters long before that milestone, but just know it takes actual time and experience to get better on our machines. Just as a pilot has to have a minimum number of hours to become certified, we too need to put in our "required hours." Where are you on the road to 10,000?