RDR Registered Diplomate Reporter common mistakes
RDR Registered Diplomate Reporter · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Answers who/whom, between you and I, less/fewer, and subject-verb agreement items by ear, choosing whichever option sounds most formal rather than applying the rule.
Spoken habits and hypercorrection feel safer under time pressure; the candidate has never converted the rule into a mechanical test they can run in seconds.
What to do instead
Run a fixed test before marking: substitute he/him for who/whom, delete the intervening prepositional phrase to expose the true subject, and decide whether the noun is countable before choosing less or fewer. Drill 20 items a day, stating the rule aloud before selecting.
Joins two independent clauses with only a comma, or sets off a restrictive clause with commas while leaving a nonrestrictive clause unmarked.
Punctuation is decided by where the voice would pause rather than by clause structure, so the ear inserts and omits commas the grammar does not allow.
What to do instead
Bracket and label each clause as independent or dependent and each element as essential or nonessential before punctuating; two independents take a period, semicolon, or conjunction, and commas go only around nonessential material. Work 30-sentence sets until the labeling step is automatic.
Switches between numerals and spelled-out words for the same kind of quantity within one passage, and capitalizes titles, court names, and dates inconsistently from page to page.
No single style authority is fixed in mind, so the candidate follows personal habit or imitates inconsistencies in the source document.
What to do instead
Commit to one stated style manual and write a one-page personal style card covering numbers, dates, times, titles, and court names; apply the card to a full practice transcript, then audit it line by line against the card.
Confuses legal terms that sit near each other alphabetically but occur at different stages of a case, such as arraignment versus indictment versus information, or deposition versus affidavit, and picks the definition that fits the wrong stage.
Vocabulary was studied from alphabetical glossaries and flashcards grouped by spelling instead of by the order in which the events occur.
What to do instead
Rebuild the vocabulary as two timelines: criminal (arrest, initial appearance, arraignment, preliminary hearing, information or indictment, trial, sentencing, appeal) and civil (pleadings, discovery, deposition, motions, trial, judgment). Place every term on its timeline with a one-line definition and a note on who speaks at that stage.
Misreads abbreviations and combining forms whose meaning depends on context (MS, MI, PT, PSA, OR) and misidentifies suffixes that change a procedure, treating -ectomy, -otomy, and -ostomy as interchangeable.
Each abbreviation was memorized with a single expansion, and word parts were memorized as whole words rather than composed from prefix, root, and suffix.
What to do instead
For every high-risk abbreviation, list two or three possible expansions and the context that selects one; each day, decompose 20 unfamiliar terms into parts, write the literal meaning, then the clinical meaning, and check the order of operations the suffix implies.
Cannot state concrete facts about the software used daily, such as the default file extension, dictionary and backup file types, where automatic backups are stored, or which connection setting drives realtime, and guesses on technology items.
The software is operated by muscle memory through menus; configuration screens are never opened, so questions about settings and file behavior feel abstract.
What to do instead
Write a one-page spec sheet for your own software and verify every line in the actual menus: transcript and dictionary file extensions, backup interval and storage location, realtime connection type, and export formats. Re-verify after every update and after any change of machine.
Skips the audio-verification pass on a practice transcript, and exports a finished file without confirming that pagination, line numbering, and required format survived the conversion.
Under time pressure a saved file is treated as a delivered file, and conversion errors stay invisible until someone else opens the output.
What to do instead
Apply a fixed pre-delivery checklist to every practice job: scoped audio sync check against the recording, page and line count, header and footer fields, search for untranslated steno and unresolved speaker tags, then open the exported file in the recipient's format and read the first and last pages.
Treats a continuously synced cloud folder as a backup and has never performed a restore, and uses archive and backup as if they were the same operation.
Synchronization creates a feeling of safety, but deletions and corruption replicate instantly to the cloud, so the candidate has never seen the failure mode the exam is testing.
What to do instead
Write out the three distinct terms and the scheme behind them, then perform and document one full test restore of a practice job including dictionary and settings files; note the elapsed time and what was missing.
Answers ethics items from workplace habit or personal morality rather than from the profession's written canons, for example accepting an assignment connected to a relative's firm, discussing a proceeding on social media, or contacting a represented party directly.
Ethics knowledge is absorbed informally on the job, so the candidate has never read the governing code canon by canon or applied it to a hypothetical.
What to do instead
Read the applicable code of professional ethics canon by canon and write one concrete scenario plus the defensible action for each. Then run every practice item through three questions: does this touch confidentiality, does it create a conflict of interest, and is it within the reporter's role rather than the attorney's.
Miscalculates page-rate and deadline items, for example by forgetting that the standard transcript page is 25 lines and 56 characters, or by counting only the original when copies are separately billable.
Billing is generated by software or handled by an office manager, so the arithmetic sitting behind the invoice has never been practiced by hand.
What to do instead
Memorize the standard page definition, then rebuild a sample invoice manually from page count, per-page rate, copy rate, and turnaround with an expedite surcharge; repeat with ten timed calculations until each step is fixed in order.