stenotype

She came, as all her readers have noticed, from the Ozarks, the daughter of a judge and a court reporter whose stenotype’s imprint adorns the interior pages of her 1998 mostly-prose poem “Deepstep Come Shining.”

Brought up in a large unaestheticized house littered with Congressional Records and stenotype paper by a Chancery Judge and The Court’s hazel-eyed Reporter who took down his every word which was law.

I use a stenotype, or shorthand machine, connected to a computer that contains captioning software.

To bad his stenotype machine wasn’t connected to the Internet.

The record for a stenographer is 260 WPM, but the translation of words into key-presses and then back into words is idiosyncratic, and so the cryptic curtain of letters produced by a stenotype machine has to be transcribed by a person, or by an expensive computerized stenotype, which internally translates the notations into plain language, using a personalized dictionary for each stenographer’s abbreviations.