Here is a thought experiment.

A court reporter sits through a seven-hour deposition. The testimony is fast, the vocabulary is dense, the speakers talk over each other. The reporter, overwhelmed, writes almost nothing. At the end of the day, they calculate their stroke count.

It is spectacular. The lowest in the office.

High fives all around! A high six for the guy with the extra finger.

This is not a paradox. It is how the metric works. Stroke count is a ratio of strokes to captured words. Words you did not write are not in the denominator. They were never captured, so they do not exist in the math.

The less you write, the better you look.

You could capture half a proceeding and post a better number than the reporter who captured all of it. Bravo. Lowest stroke count in the building.

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The court reporting profession has built its dominant training philosophy around stroke count as the primary measure of writing efficiency. Write shorter. Use fewer strokes per word. The entire brief-heavy architecture exists to drive that number down.

No one ever asked whether the number could see the job.

It cannot. A reporter who captures 60% of a proceeding with brief-heavy writing will post a lower stroke count than a reporter who captures 100% of the same proceeding with straightforward phonetic writing.

Completeness is not in the formula.

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No one advocating for extreme stroke reduction has ever published their stroke counts from actual, sustained deposition work. What exists are contest results, classroom exercises, and theoretical calculations of what the system could produce if perfectly executed.

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we have been counting what we wrote.
we should have been counting what we missed.

The certification rate for court reporters is approximately 2%. The profession blames students.

The metric cannot see the problem. Neither, apparently, can the people who built it.