Who said you had to write short, dense, difficult strokes to write fast?
Everyone who made this job harder than it needs to be.
Write that way, and drops and mental foul-ups tend to pile up as the day goes on.
Not to mention fatigue heavy enough to blur your focus.
Writing simply is the key to staying accurate, hour after hour, page after page.
They complicate; I simplify.
Every phrase but the most common can create real friction — it forces a guess before the words arrive.
Write what you hear as you hear it.
Right now, it doesn’t matter how you write it.
Simple.
Keep it that way; nobody cares how many strokes you write.
Combine that with minimal outlines of the most common words, and you’ve got a whole new experience.
Don’t sleep on it.
Tom Fernicola has been reporting complex litigation in New York City for 37 years. He is the author of THE SCIENCE OF STENO: Why Court Reporting Is So Hard — and What the Math Proves, and the creator of BREVITY: Write Simply™, available at brevitysteno.com and Amazon.