All About Court Reporting – What Are The Things That You Need To Know About It?
One very important thing that you need to know with regards to court reporting is the fact that it involves certain equipment and equally certain skills as well to use the said equipment in transcribing spoken words into verbatim written record. If you are just a regular observer and does not have any background experience using steno machine, you will surely be mystified with the twenty-two buttons that is possess. You may end up thinking about how there are only twenty-two buttons when in fact, there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. The unusualness of the equipment used in court reporting is one thing, the ability of court reporters to transcribe words into text at a speed that will put the fastest typist to shame is another. Not only that, there goes the fact as well that the modern court reporting equipment being used today allows for real-time transcriptions. Through this, court reporting has evolved and it continues to become an interesting field that will surely pique your curiosity.
The next thing about court reporting that you should know of is that it all started with the use of the machine. Court reporting is a process by which court reporters are using steno machines to transcribe, word-for-word, whatever is spoken into text. If you have seen a steno machine in the past, you will see how it has lesser keys when compared to a normal keyboard. Steno machine works by allowing court reporters to write words in accordance to the syllables of the words, not the letters of every word. The structure of the steno machine goes like this: the buttons that are laid out with the keys on the left, they represent the beginning sound of a syllable; the keys on the middle represent the middle sound of a syllable, and; as for the keys on the right, they represent the ending sound of a syllable.
Due to the fact that the middle sound of a syllable is intended for a vowel sound, the beginning and the ending sounds are, more or less, consonants and with this, they are grouped accordingly and are placed in such a way that the left hand enters the beginning consonant and the right hand with the ending consonant. There are times when syllables can start and end with the same letter hence, the steno machine has two R, T as well as S.
What we have here are the things that you should learn when it comes to court reporting.