The defining metric of a court reporter is accuracy, yet Mark Kislingbury openly admits his method does not include practicing for control — and instructs students to abandon accuracy entirely during practice.
Mark Kislingbury is a fast writer. He holds speed records and has built an entire pedagogy around writing short and moving fingers quickly across a steno machine. But when you look at how he teaches students to acquire the skill of court reporting, a glaring contradiction emerges: the job demands accuracy, but his pedagogy abandons it.
On the official Magnum Steno FAQ page, Kislingbury outlines his speed building method in his own words:
> “Here is a description of my speed building method, which does not include practicing for control... We are trying to teach him to move his fingers faster, at all costs, even at the cost of accuracy.” [1]
His core claim is that if a student practices at speeds 25–30% faster than they can comfortably write, their baseline speed will increase and their accuracy will “automatically” follow. He explicitly tells students that control practice is unnecessary: “So, no need to practice for ‘control,’ as you have already improved merely by high-speed practice” [1].
It sounds like a compelling shortcut. There is only one problem: it violates a century of research into motor learning and skill acquisition.
What the Science Actually Says
In cognitive science and motor learning, the relationship between movement speed and precision is known as the speed-accuracy trade-off, formally quantified by Fitts’s Law [2]. The principle is foundational: as the speed of a movement increases, its spatial precision decreases. This is not a quirk of steno. It is a law of human motor behavior.
When you instruct a student to move “at all costs, even at the cost of accuracy,” you are not simply failing to train accuracy. You are actively training errors. The brain learns what it practices. If it practices hitting the wrong keys quickly, it learns to hit the wrong keys quickly.
A 2019 study in the *Journal of Motor Behavior* examined exactly this question — whether speed or accuracy instructions during motor sequence training produce different learning outcomes. The finding was unambiguous: speed instructions and accuracy instructions produce fundamentally different neural acquisitions. Students trained under speed instructions developed faster sequencing but weaker precision; students trained under accuracy instructions developed stronger reaction skill and more reliable execution [3]. The two outcomes are not interchangeable. You cannot train one and expect the other to appear as a byproduct.
A 1952 study in the *Research Quarterly* — one of the earliest controlled experiments on this exact question — concluded: “The rule for apprentices should be — first study accuracy and an easy position and regard speed as a secondary consideration” [4]. That finding has been replicated across disciplines for 70 years.
The Illusion of “Focused Practice”
Kislingbury defends this method by requiring what he calls “focused practice.” But when you look at how he actually defines that term, it reduces to four instructions: move fast, don’t fall behind, try to hit the right keys (”approximate” the stroke), and give 100% concentration.
He explicitly notes: *”It is important to note that he will not be able to read what he is writing at 250-260.”* [1]
This creates a massive internal contradiction in his own pedagogy. On one hand, Magnum Steno requires the precise memorization of tens of thousands of specific briefs. On the other hand, his “focused practice” instructs students to write at speeds where they are merely “approximating” strokes and cannot even read their own output.
You cannot demand exact memorization and then train students to approximate execution. Concentration without error feedback is just trying hard at the wrong thing. A student who concentrates intensely while approximating incorrect strokes at 250 wpm is not building accuracy. They are building confident inaccuracy. What Kislingbury calls “focused practice” is what cognitive scientists call naive practice — repetition with effort, but without the feedback loop required for genuine skill acquisition.
The Piano Teacher Who Doesn’t Exist
Imagine a piano teacher instructing a student to play a Chopin sonata at 150% of the normal tempo. The student hits wrong notes, skips chords, and mashes the keys in a desperate attempt to keep up. The teacher says, “Don’t worry about hitting the right notes. Just move your fingers faster at all costs. When you slow back down to the normal tempo, you’ll automatically be playing the right notes.”
No music conservatory in the world would accept this pedagogy. It is universally understood in music education that you practice slowly to build the correct neural pathways, and only increase speed once accuracy is locked in. The correct motor pattern must be encoded before it can be accelerated.
Yet in court reporting, students are told to chase the metronome and abandon the notes.
Accuracy Is the Job. Speed Is the Means.
Speed is a metric of execution. Accuracy is the metric of the job. They are not the same thing, and training one does not produce the other.
“Approximating” the record is not court reporting. Court reporting is the verbatim, real-time phonetic capture of unpredictable human speech, where a single dropped or misstroked word can alter the legal record. The job does not grade on a curve. There is no partial credit for being close.
This is why the 93 percent failure rate of brief-heavy stenography is not a mystery [5]. Students are handed a system that requires massive brief memorization — which saturates cognitive load — and are then told to practice it at speeds where accuracy is explicitly deprioritized. The brain cannot consolidate correct motor patterns under these conditions. It is being asked to go fast before it knows where it is going.
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Tom Fernicola is a 37-year working court reporter and the author of The Science of Steno: Why Court Reporting Is So Hard. He applies cognitive load theory and human performance physics to stenographic training. Read the research at tomfernicola.substack.com or visit brevitysteno.com.
References
[1] Kislingbury, Mark. “Frequently Asked Questions about Court Reporting and Speed Building.” Magnum Steno. https://www.magnumsteno.com/faq.html
[2] Fitts, Paul M. “The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement.” *Journal of Experimental Psychology* 47, no. 6 (1954): 381–391.
[3] Barnhoorn, J. S., Panzer, S., Godde, B., et al. “Training Motor Sequences: Effects of Speed and Accuracy Instructions.” *Journal of Motor Behavior* 51, no. 4 (2019): 369–379. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00222895.2018.1528202
[4] Solley, W. H. “The effects of verbal instruction of speed and accuracy upon the learning of a motor skill.” *Research Quarterly* 23, no. 2 (1952): 231–240.
[5] Texas Workforce Commission FOIA Data on Court Reporting Academy Completion Rates.