Experience in court reporting does not automatically build expertise; without deliberate, feedback-driven practice, years of repetition on a structurally flawed steno system will only reinforce bad habits and cause performance plateaus.

In 2005, researchers at Harvard Medical School reviewed sixty-two studies on a single question: does doctor performance improve with experience? More years, more patients, more cases — better care. That was the assumption.

In almost every study, the opposite was true. Performance grew worse over time, or stayed flat. Older doctors — the ones with decades in the field — knew less and performed worse than doctors with a fraction of their experience. Researchers concluded their patients likely fared worse because of it. Only two of sixty-two studies showed improvement with time.

Two out of sixty-two.

Showing up every day and doing the work is not the same thing as getting better at it.

Doctors aren’t lazy. They attend conferences, workshops, continuing education. They put in the hours. The hours produced decline anyway — not because of bad intentions, but because they were doing what researchers call naive practice. Repetition without feedback. No targeted correction. No deliberate attention to what’s breaking down.

Naive practice doesn’t build expertise. It builds habit. And habit is almost impossible to disrupt through more repetition. You don’t practice your way out of a problem by doing more of what created it.

Think of a car with a bad wheel alignment. You can put 100,000 miles on it. The tires wear wrong the entire time. The miles don’t fix the alignment — they just make you more comfortable driving crooked.

Court reporting has roughly an 85-percent dropout rate before certification. The field frames it as a character problem — commitment, focus, talent.

But the question nobody asks: what about the reporters who make it? The ones who spend ten, twenty, thirty years in the chair?

Are they improving? Or are they doing what the doctors did — accumulating years while the underlying load quietly hardens around them?

The pattern is consistent. The speed ceiling hits. The brief list grows past the point of reliable recall. The fatigue is chronic, not dramatic — manageable until it isn’t. Reporters compensate: careful job selection, positioning adjustments, nights rebuilding briefs that keep slipping. They call it adaptation.

Managing a load problem is not the same as solving one.

Play chess against yourself every day. Never study your losses. Never compare your moves to a stronger player. You’ll get fast. You’ll get confident. You’ll get fluent — including with your mistakes. Bad moves will feel as natural as good ones because you’ve practiced both equally.

That’s what naive practice produces. Fluent errors. And fluency is seductive. It feels like mastery. It isn’t.

Anders Ericsson spent his career studying this. Hours alone don’t produce expertise. Deliberate practice does — targeted, corrective, feedback-driven work aimed at the gap between current performance and the performance ceiling. Without that loop, hours are just noise.

For court reporters, the implication is direct: if the system itself is generating the errors — if the physical and cognitive load built into the theory exceeds what the average human brain can sustain at speed — practicing harder doesn’t close the gap. It deepens the groove.

Twenty years on a structurally heavy system isn’t twenty years of improvement. It’s twenty years of reinforcing the problem, interrupted by increasingly sophisticated workarounds.

It’s like a surgeon who compensates for a flaw in technique by extending every procedure an extra ten minutes. More careful, yes. The underlying technique is still broken.

Reporters who spent decades on these systems did exactly what they were taught to do, as well as it could be done. The problem isn’t effort. Effort without a feedback loop, applied to a structurally heavy system, produces endurance — not improvement.

The field has treated the dropout rate as a character question for forty years. Students who leave aren’t failing. They’re responding rationally to a load that the research, had anyone applied it, would have predicted they couldn’t sustain.

The doctors didn’t fail either. They practiced. They just practiced the wrong thing, the wrong way, for too long — and nobody was measuring whether it was working.

Tom Fernicola is a 37-year litigation court reporter and creator of the BREVITY stenographic system. His book The Science of Steno: Why Court Reporting Is So Hard — and What the Math Proves introduces the first mathematical framework in stenographic history.