On the Subject of Stenography

Typing at an astonishing one word per minute!

Welcome to your new job as a court reporter. All words must be input using the plover system. No words will require the * modifier as part of their plover representation, and all words can and must be input with a single stroke. Refer to Appendix 1 for more information on the plover system.

For your training, you’ll be required to enter three words into the stenograph within 30 seconds. Press the * key to hear your first word. The stenograph display will also present the word written. To submit your answer, select the keys which stroke the word presented and press the release key to submit.

Once you successfully submit a word, the next word will be presented and played. Submitting three words correctly in a row will solve the module. If you submit an incorrect word or fail to submit three words within 30 seconds, the court will be displeased, and you will be fired (the module resets).

Appendix 1 - Stenography Basics

Stenographs are used to transcribe spoken word to text at the pace of the speaker. Rather than typing individual letters, multiple keys are pressed and then released at once to form letter clusters, typically syllables of words. Strokes are always formed by an optional starting consonant performed by the left fingers, a vowel formed by the thumbs, and an optional ending consonant formed by the right fingers.

The keys are divided into seven keys on the left for the starting consonant, ten keys on the right for the ending consonant, and four keys underneath for the vowels. The central key dividing the two halves is a disambiguator used to distinguish between two words with the same sound. This is necessary because words are generally formed using the phonetics of the syllables and not the written structure of the word.

Any stroke with a short vowel (a vowel on its own) however, uses the vowel as in the written word even if the vowel sounds different. ‘EU’ is used to form the short ‘i’ sound like in ‘lid.’ For grouped vowels, the sound that the vowel would typically make it used. (Heart uses ‘a’ because the ‘ea’ forms the short a vowel sound). Unstressed vowel sounds can be dropped entirely such as in ‘ment(a)l’.

Generally, letters must be pressed in steno order depicted below or written as STKPWHRAO*EUFRPBLGTSDZ. Strokes can only be formed from letters read in steno order except in the case of inversions. A word may violate steno order if it saves a stroke, there is no more than one inversion, and it only inverts two sounds adjacent. For example, ‘portal’ cannot be stroked as ‘PORTL’ since ‘L’ comes before ‘T’ in steno order, but since this is a valid case for an inversion, we may stroke ‘PORLT.’

Stenography Clusters

Some sounds do not have one-to-one mappings to keys on the steno keyboard. As such, multiple keys stroked together can create compound clusters. The following table should be used as a reference for these sounds, though the rules above must also be respected when forming words.

Starting Sound	Stroke	Vowel Sound	Stroke	Ending Sound	Stroke
D	TK	cAt	A	K	BG
F	TP	lOt	O	N	PB
L	HR	bEt	E	M/psaLM	PL
hard G	TKPW	sUn	U	J (soft G)	PBLG
B	PW	bIn	EU	truTH	*T
V	SR	tApe	AEU	suCH	FP
N	TPH	kEEp	AOE	bruSH	RB
M	PH	bOAt	OE	briNG/biNGe	PBG
J (soft G)	SKWR	glUE/fEW	AOU	buMP	*PL
Y	KWR	wIse	AOEU	caRVe	FRB
THink	TH	thOUght/sAW	AU	beLCH/buLGe	LG
CHild	KH	tOWn	OU	miLK	*LG
SHow	SH	tOY/fOIl	OEU	wiNK	*PBG
		OO	AO	noTION (shn)	GS
				aCTION (kshn)	BGS
				churCH/munCH	FRPB
				ST	FT
				V	F