I didn’t agonize over whether court reporting was right for me — it looked like the kind of thing I’m good at. But I was curious whether research existed on what makes someone a good fit. It does. I found five machine stenography studies — Gilsdorf (1968), Jacobsen & Borchardt (1980), Bottas (1981), Morse (1989),…

In her 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua tells the story of her seven-year-old daughter Lulu trying to learn a piano piece called “The Little White Donkey” by Jacques Ibert. The piece requires each hand to maintain a completely different rhythm — a genuinely difficult coordination challenge. Lulu couldn’t do it.…

At some point, almost every court reporting student asks: how long is this going to take? Usually right after someone at Thanksgiving asks them. There’s no clean answer. Stenographic court reporting is a skill, not a course — there’s no regulated number of hours you show up. But you still have to plan your life…

Most professional credentials test something easier than the skill itself. Court reporting doesn’t. When a reporter passes the certification exam, the skill and the test are the same thing: capturing speech at 225 words per minute. Passing it means something. That sounds obvious. But most professions don’t work this way. The nursing illusion The NCLEX-RN…

Nobody signs up for an Ironman — a 140-mile swim/bike/run race — without rearranging their life first. The average participant spends seven months training 18 to 30 hours a week. If you don’t have the time, you don’t sign up. Stenographic court reporting asks for similar hours — but over years, not months. NCRA’s survey…

Court reporting’s 85% dropout rate isn’t mainly about stenography being hard. It’s about who’s attempting it. Who’s enrolling College of Marin’s program self-assessment describes their students: predominantly female, many re-entering the workforce after a life change like a divorce, many already holding four-year degrees, choosing court reporting over graduate school. Most court reporting programs are…

Court reporting has a massive workforce shortage, and fewer than 15% of students who start a stenographic court reporting program complete it. Remarkably little systematic research has examined what predicts who finishes and who doesn’t. The field has practical wisdom, but it’s limited. The most common advice — practice more, believe in yourself, stay positive…