>> Stenography Primer [01] //

Hello. This will be an article series about stenography. I will break down what it is, how it works, how to start doing stenography yourself, and more. I'll answer any and all questions left in the replies.

Each article will be numbered, and I'll try to organize the series in as coherent order as I can. Unfortunately, stenography is a very numinous skill and field of study, making finding the "perfect" entry point into it difficult to pin down, as I'm sure you'll see through this series. However, I will try to be as brief and descriptive as possible.

With that said, let's get started.

// What is Stenography?

Stenography -- and more importantly, machine stenography -- is a shorthand writing system for the purpose of taking down human speech verbatim. Using a steno machine, key presses are converted codes that are then read by a stenographer, who interprets this code as words or phrases.

While a standard keyboard peforms a similar function of taking in keystrokes and outputting letters, a steno machine functions entirely opposite of a keyboard.

When you type on a keyboard, you press a single key, then release the key before pressing another one. Since computers register a keystroke and output a letter the moment a key is pressed, you're forced to quickly press and release a key so as not to duplicate a letter. Consequently, you have to type letters sequentially for what you're typing to be legible.

A steno machine, on the other hand, only outputs a keystroke once a key is released. This distinction is small, but it completely changes how the machine is used. This means that so long as one key is held down, we can add as many keys to a single "stroke" as we want, meaning we can press every key on the steno machine and have the output of all 22 keys be recognized as a word.

This is the magic of stenography. By combining multiple keys into a single stroke, we form syllables, full words, and even entire phrases in a single press. If we took every possible combination of key combinations in a single stroke, there are over 4 million words and phrases that can be done in a single keystroke, more combinations than every word currently utilized in modern English (approximately 200,000 still in use).

This makes stenography a much faster and more efficient writing system than a keyboard. On a keyboard, the average typing speed is somewhere around 40-80 WPM, give or take. Most users fall within that speed range. A stenographer writes at around 180-240 WPM, while achieving bursts of upwards of 300 WPM when transcribing people who talk fast. Mark Kislingbury, a court stenographer, currently holds the world record of 370 WPM with a 95.4% accuracy.

Quite a difference, isn't it?

But remembering 200,000 potential single-stroke key combinations is extremely challenging, even for professional stenographers. Instead, most stenographers will use 1 to 3 strokes on average for every word. You might think this would be more difficult than remembering a single stroke, but the goal of stenography is to write without thinking; and surprisingly, when writing a word takes more strokes to complete it, it requires less thinking.

This is achieved by using the steno layout and what's known as a steno theory.

In the next article, I'll go over the steno machine's layout and what the writing system looks like. Until then, I hope I've piqued your interest in stenography and that you'll follow along with the series.