Important Information That You Must Know Of When It Comes To Court Reporting
There are quite a number of things that you have to be aware of when it comes to court reporting such as the fact that it involves the use of certain pieces of equipment and equally certain skills to use the pieces of equipment to transcribe spoken words into verbatim written record. If you are not familiar with the steno machine, you will be mystified with the twenty-two buttons that it has. For sure, you will start to ask yourself how such a thing happen when the alphabet comprises of twenty-six letters. 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. In addition to that, you have to be aware of the fact that the modern court reporting equipment that we are using today allows for real-time transcriptions. At present, court reporting has started to evolve and it will continue to become interesting and useful.
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. For those of you out there who may have seen a real steno machine, surely, you noticed how it has fewer keys compared to a typical keyboard. If you are confused on how steno machines work, well, they actually do by means of allowing court reporters to write words in accordance to their syllables, not on the letters of every word. The buttons on a steno machine are laid out in the following format: the keys on the left are used to embody the beginning sound of a syllable; as for the middle, the keys there are used to signify the middle sound of a syllable, and; with regards to the keys on the right, they denote the ending sound of a syllable.
The middle sound of a syllable is usually a vowel sound while the beginning sound as well as the ending sounds are consonants and because of this, the vowels and the consonants are ground together accordingly and positioned in such a manner 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.
All these and more are the things that you must learn about when it comes to court reporting.