In part
one I talked about how people who used speech synthesizers
to communicate could use steno to speak as quickly and as easily as
people who use their voices. In part
two I concentrated on the fluency that steno brings to
prose composition and programming. In this article I want to talk
about the ergonomic benefits of steno, with special emphasis on split
screen steno keyboard configurations.
When I first started studying steno, I was a qwerty transcriptionist,
working for a television captioning company. Three hours of nonstop
typing at breakneck speed in the morning, an hour for lunch, four more
hours of frantic typing in the afternoon. By the end of the week, my
wrists would be screaming, and I started to worry that my temporary
day job was dooming my future career. I tried getting a Microsoft
Natural keyboard, which claimed to offer a more ergonomic
slope to the wrists, but I didn't stop feeling that Friday ache until
I was able to abandon qwerty and start using my steno keyboard at
work. I mentioned previously how typing each letter of each word can
interfere with the smooth flow of composition, and in a subsequent
article I'll get into more detail about the speed differential between
qwerty and steno, but the relative potential for long-term
physiological damage is just as important to mention.
In courtroom dramas on TV, you'll often see a court reporter sitting
next to the bench, hammering away on an old avocado-colored steno
machine while their notes stream into the paper tray. (Most steno
machines these days use LCD screens instead of paper, but I guess
directors find the old-fashioned ones more picturesque.) Sometimes TV
shows actually go out of their way to cast real court reporters, but
more often they'll just get a likely-looking extra, put her in a
beehive and hornrims, and tell her to look stenographical. Do you know
how to tell the difference between the real ones and the fakers? It's
easy.
Watch their hands. Heck, even easier: Watch their forearms. The fakers
will be frantically wriggling their fingers, assuming that the only
way to keep up with the cross examination is to twiddle away like
Glenn Gould on uppers.
The real ones, on the other hand, will be making one clean, relaxed
stroke every half-second or so. Their hands will make small lateral
movements across the keyboard, but the force of each stroke will come
from their forearms, not their wrists or their fingers.
If an average word is six letters long, a qwerty typist has to move
their fingers up and down six times in the space of a second to type
60 words a minute. That requires engaging the entire arm, from
fingertip to shoulder, rapidly and without any rest for as long as the
typist is typing. As one finger finishes firing, another steps up
immediately, and the more quickly someone tries to type, the more
violent and uncontrolled their motions become.
In steno, by contrast, you get a 14% bonus right off the bat (again,
assuming that 6-letter average word length), because there's no space
bar; all spaces are inserted automatically by the software. Then you
get the ergonomic advantage of pushing each stroke statically from the
forearm, like a pianist playing chords, rather than bearing the full
force of each stroke a finger at a time. That cuts down on the overall
percussive shock. There's also the crucial rest interval between each
stroke, which allows the stenographer to relax, redistribute their
fingers, and move back onto the keyboard for the next stroke, rather
than forcing them to keep their hands always tense and wiggling, a
major cause of cramping and typist's claw. And then, of course, the
most obvious advantage is that for every six qwerty strokes you type,
you only type one in steno. While you're racing feverishly to keep up
at 90 WPM, in steno it gets almost boring if the speed drops below
180.
Now, all this is not to say that stenographers never get repetitive
stress injuries. Type 40 hours a week for decades, plus countless
hours of transcript editing, and even that 700% efficiency advantage
won't necessarily spare your hands and fingers. Most stenographers use
fixed keyboards that force them to hold their wrists parallel to the
floor, an unnatural and unhealthy angle. I started on one of those
myself, and coupled with the qwerty typing in my day job, I found the
first part of steno school -- when I was only writing at 140 to 160
words per minute, six hours a week -- a painful and worrying
experience. My dad, an infrequent computer user who hunted and pecked
at a snail's pace, had recently undergone surgery for carpal tunnel
syndrome, and I knew genetics were often a factor in RSIs.
While still a student, I decided to buy the most ergonomic machine on
the market. The choice was simple. Only the Neutrino Group line
(the Gemini, Gemini2, Piper, Evolution, and Revolution) allowed not
only for a more natural wrist angle -- 45 degrees to the ground rather
than parallel -- but, crucially, it also allowed for minor adjustments
to be made quickly and easily in a wide range of motion. Now when I
feel a twinge, I slightly adjust the yaw, pitch, or roll, and I feel a
different set of muscles kicking in to take over for the fatigued
ones. I'm not a pitchman for the Neutrino Group by any means (though
I've given them favorable reviews,
I've always made sure to mention both pros and cons), but they have a
fair amount of anecdotal data showing that court reporters with severe
RSI problems who switched to Gemini machines were able to lessen or
eliminate their pain and numbness in a significant number of
cases.
I've provided CART at speed over 200 words per minute for more than
seven hours at a stretch, and my wrists felt far better afterwards
than they would after only an hour or two back in my 100 WPM qwerty
days. Steno lets me be less frantic and more efficient. My ergonomic
machine keeps me from locking my arms into an uncomfortable position.
I realize that Plover is primarily aimed at people who are not going
to be shelling out a grand for an ergonomic steno machine, and that
the $60 SideWinder keyboard I'm recommending to amateur steno fans
does not have all the adjustable advantages of the Neutrino Group
machines, but it does have all the other ergonomic benefits I've
discussed in this article. Also, part of my long-range plan in
releasing this free software is to greatly increase the number of
people who use steno, potentially bringing down the prices of the
ergonomic machines as their market size increases from "a tiny
fraction of the estimated 40,000 professional stenographers in the US,
the majority of whom chose to buy Stenograph brand writers for
some inexplicable reason" to "a substantial number of people who spend
most of their workdays typing on their computers, who have already
switched to steno using $60 keyboards but who like it so much they're
looking to upgrade".
Maybe it's a pipe dream, but it makes plenty of sense to me. Computers
are a huge part of modern daily life, and RSIs are a big problem for
many people who use them. Steno offers a possible solution.
Note to
stenographic professionals (court reporters, captioners, and
CART providers): I know you don't like being called
"stenographers" and I know you think I should call the act of
using a steno machine "writing" rather than "typing". Go argue
with Truman
Capote; it's all the same to me.
