Three 300-wpm Bursts and a Clerk's Complaint
Commercial-litigation trial, jury out. You average 240 wpm for the first two hours, with three or four 20- to 30-second bursts near 300 wpm during cross-examination. You feed realtime to the judge's clerk and, separately, to a trial-presentation vendor. At the first recess the clerk mentions that 'some words come out run together' during the fast parts. Your audio backup is running clean. Your writer shows no hardware errors and no stacked keys, and your untranslate rate on the slow sections is under 1%. You write verbatim, including false starts and 'uh.' There are two more days of trial.
1. How do you diagnose 'run together,' and what do you check first?
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Isolate before you change anything. There are three broad causes and they have different fixes:
- Your writing. Dropped space strokes, or words merged into a single stroke whose output concatenates, produce genuinely joined text.
- Distribution. Dropped or reordered characters across the connection.
- The consumer's display. Word-wrap, font, chunking, or scroll settings on the clerk's or vendor's software.
The first check is your own local realtime window. Scroll to a burst; if your window shows the same joined text, the fault is in your writing and the fix is yours. If your window is clean and current, you are distributing good text and the problem is downstream - do not touch your writing.
Second check: compare the clerk's report against the vendor's, and against a timestamped replay of your own file from that burst. Two consumers seeing different symptoms points at display, not at you.
2. The problem turns out to be yours: you are dropping space strokes in the bursts. What do you change for the afternoon session, and what do you refuse to change?
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The fix for a speed problem is fewer strokes per word, not fewer words.
Concretely: mine the morning transcript for the phrases that recur in this case - counsel's stock objections, the witness's boilerplate answers, the exhibit references - and brief them at the recess. Those phrases are exactly where you lose control, and shaving two or three strokes there buys back the space strokes.
What you refuse to change:
- Verbatim. No paraphrasing, no dropping false starts, no dropping 'uh' to buy time. That is a record problem disguised as a realtime problem.
- Cold briefs. Anything new gets tested in a scratch file at the recess, not introduced first in a 300-wpm burst.
- Chasing dropped strokes. If you fall behind in a burst, write through and reconcile against the audio backup afterwards. Stopping to repair produces a hole.
Accept a somewhat higher untranslate rate inside the bursts as the better trade.
3. The vendor asks for 'a cleaner feed' for their display. How do you respond?
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Get the definition first, because 'clean' means at least three different things: no untranslates, consistent formatting, or a non-verbatim feed.
You can commit to the ones that are yours to control: consistent speaker labels and Q/A designations, consistent punctuation policy, consistent treatment of parentheticals and exhibit references, and clean carriage of the feed.
You cannot commit to a zero-untranslate live feed at 300 wpm, and you should say so plainly rather than let the vendor build a client expectation you will fail. Point out that the certified transcript is scoped and can be clean; the live feed is a work product produced under time pressure.
If they want a post-session cleanup pass, that is a scoping conversation with a price and a deadline, not an adjustment to the live feed. Put your answer in writing so there is a record of what was and was not promised.