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President's Message

January, 2012

I recently was asked, and accepted, an invitation to teach StenoCAT 32 at the Illinois/Wisconsin combined Fall Seminar at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. I have always said that the best way to learn something is to teach it, having come upon this morsel of knowledge trying to teach/learn the card game Bridge (not to be confused with our Bridge Software that we use for our attorneys’ hookups).

Since I have been a reporter for, it seems, at least 100 years, and since my friend Sue Terry and I started writing Realtime when it first became available, and we had to learn to rewrite just about everything in our dictionaries, and we had reprogrammed our Smartkeys to mimic those of a previous CAT program that we had been using, it had become very easy for me to just be complacent and content with continuing to write the way I did and not use all the bells and whistles that StenoCAT’s newest releases had available for us. Why should I use them, when what I was doing was working just fine?

Well, in order to teach, it was necessary for me to really try out and use the new bells and whistles. And guess what? They are phenomenal. If you aren’t using them, you are missing out. I immediately downloaded the StenoCAT 32 Realtime Dictionary, and started implementing many of them during my realtime jobs, and lo and behold, they worked like a charm. Then I decided to try out the Smart Briefs, and Voila, they worked also, and I found if I checked them out in the global table when I was updating my dictionary, that I would find some that I hadn’t used during the job, but were really good ones to use in the future. An example: SRUL for "eventually." I moved on to using word/word to change a number to words, and number/number to change a word do a number, and the list goes on and on.

For me it was easier to copy just the entries from the Realtime dictionary that I wanted to use and paste them into my Master Dictionary. And for many I chose my own steno outline, but the bottom line is that StenoCAT’s new releases were the catalyst to make me a better realtime writer.

And in this day and age, with Voice Recognition, and Voice Reporting and Tape Recording hot on our heels, if you are not writing realtime and/or offering and selling rough drafts, you are simply asking to become obsolete.

When they say, "You can’t teach an old dog new tricks," they don’t know what they are talking about. This "old" (as in having a lot of experience) dog has learned a lot in a very short period of time, and I am not finished yet.

So, I hope to see the rest of you hop on this bandwagon and get cracking with the best of the best StenoCAT’s dictionaries and Smartkeys and become and remain the best of the best court reporters.

Hope to see you March 1st, 2012, in San Diego, California!

Until next time, Keep Learning, Jenny