Machine Shorthand or Voice Writing Speed and Accuracy
What the skills leg measures
Illinois certifies shorthand reporters through a CSR skills examination built from timed dictation legs - testimony, jury charge, and literary material - each transcribed and graded on accuracy rather than raw speed. Dropped, added, or substituted words, misstated numbers, and punctuation that changes meaning all count as errors, and the total is converted to a percentage standard, so a clean pass at the test speed outscores a heroic attempt above it.
Build the vocabulary before the speed
- Drill the forum's stock phrases: plaintiff, defendant, your Honor, allocution, Illinois Pattern Jury Instructions, State's Attorney, county and circuit names, surnames of judges in your circuit.
- Train homophones in sentence context, not word lists: they're/their/there, principal/principle, lien/lean, waiver/waver.
- Voice writers speak punctuation and speaker tags on every take - "period," "new paragraph," "question mark; speaker, Mr. Hall" - until automatic.
- Practice with dictation at target-plus-ten-percent, then drop back for a clean gradable take.
Worked example
Dictation: "The witness testified that he was there on the fourteenth." Your output reads "he was their on the fourteenth." Reasoning: a single misstroke or a poor speech-model choice produced a homophone substitution, which is an accuracy error, not a speed error. Fix it with a conflict entry so the pattern for there resolves by context, and add the phrase he was there to the phrase bank. Then read back dates and numbers - fourteen/forty and fifteen/fifty are classic losses.
Traps
Chasing speed at the expense of untranslated notes; never practicing proper nouns; voice writers trusting automatic punctuation on final output; ignoring physical tension that shows up as dropped strokes late in a ten-minute leg.