Ever thought about that?

This thing that court reporters have been made to obsess over as the portal to speed.

Who has bothered to define it?

And if reporters (really, the gurus they never question) have heaped so much importance on “short” stroking, why have reporters gotten worse?

Why does the master guru extraordinaire who made short strokes a thing have some of the worst completion rates for his school in the industry?

So what is a steno stroke, and is minimizing strokes as vital to writing speed as many believe?

A stroke tells us that movement occurred, as conveyed by the pressing of a key or keys.

I have a LightSpeed. I count 26 keys, not letters, separate keys.

The S- on the left side is not fused but are two separate keys, same letter. The asterisk key is the same, not fused, two separate keys.

I am excluding the number keys for the sake of this illustration. The number of actual steno keys on your machine may vary, so please don’t let that derail you.

If a key can be either pressed or not pressed (two choices), there are two to the 26th power minus 1 (we must subtract 1 for no keys pressed at all) possible one-stroke combinations.

This means there are 67,108,863, nearly 68 million, possible variations within a stroke.

Can you already see that a stroke—any one of 68 million possible combinations—tells us nothing about what that stroke contains?

The best way I’ve come up with to define a stroke is a box, package, or container; something that pressed steno keys go into.

An analogy.

You want to ship a package out through FedEx. What do they do? They measure it and they weigh it.

Do they say, a box is a box is a box. Who cares?

No.

The box can be small and weigh ounces, or it can be small and weigh 60 pounds. The fact that it’s a box tells us nothing about its contents, or how heavy or light it may be.

Isn’t it correct that the heavier the box, the more it costs to ship?

Is shipping 10 one-pound boxes the same as shipping 10 hundred-pound boxes?

Both equal 10 boxes moved.

No. Load matters!

So is a steno stroke a valid metric or measurement?

When FedEx measures your box with a tape measure, does the tape measure change so that an inch is no longer the same measurement for every box?

Valid metrics require units to mean equal amounts, such as one inch equals one inch, one pound equals one pound.

And one stroke?

If a stroke can contain anywhere from one key to almost 68 million combinations, a stroke doesn’t tell you anything more than at least one key was pressed and it printed.

Want to play a game?

If you still think all strokes are equivalent (keys can be defined as anything), then try this: Define this stroke as the word “the”: STWHO*EFRBLGT.

Define this stroke as “you”: TKWHA*ERPLGD.

Good luck with that.

Remember your premise: all strokes are equal so what keys they consist of doesn’t matter. And if stroke count measures effort, these are interchangeable.

The point: stroke count tells us nothing about difficulty, load. Stroke count measures how many times we moved, not how hard each movement was.

Stroke count is not a unit of effort. It is merely a container, a box, a package whose difficulty (load) varies wildly.

It is a non-metric.

So everyone has been obsessed with a non-metric?

Yes.

So how did the court reporting industry become so taken by this concept that they never thought through what a stroke actually was?

I think Daniel Kahneman answered this decades ago. The 2002 Nobel Prize Laureate said:

“For some of our most important beliefs, we have no evidence at all, except that people [gurus] we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous.”

His word. Preposterous.

Preposterous: Contrary to reason or common sense; utterly absurd or ridiculous.

From Latin praeposterus—literally “with the hinder part foremost” (prae = before + posterus = coming after). The original sense was “having things in the wrong order,” which evolved into “absurdly contrary to nature or reason.”

Now, I must admit, when I read “with the hinder part foremost,” I thought of someone backing into a room crouched over, butt-first, not looking where they are going.

Do you trust the butt to take you someplace great?

The court reporting industry, when it adopted the short-stroke obsession, did exactly that. Backed into its own crisis—butt-first.