Alan H. Brock, RDR, CRR winner of the NCRA 2011 Speed Contest
with the Diamante®!
Complete interview with Judy Wolf
of Stenograph, August 20, 2011
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Alan H. Brock, RDR, CRR, of Boston, Mass., won the National Court Reporters Association 2011 Speed Contest. Contestants write and transcribe three five-minute legs–literary, legal opinion, and testimony. To qualify contestants must have an accuracy score of 95% or better. The best combined score wins the championship. Alan's combined score was 99.265%.
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Alan H. Brock, RDR, CRR, of Boston, Mass., won the National Court Reporters Association 2011 Speed Contest. Contestants write and transcribe three five-minute legs–literary, legal opinion, and testimony. To qualify contestants must have an accuracy score of 95% or better. The best combined score wins the championship. Alan's combined score was 99.265%.
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Congratulations on your remarkable achievement in winning the 2011 NCRA Speed Contest, Alan. Before we talk further about your personal experience, tell me about the Speed Contest parameters that must be achieved to win such an event.
ALAN BROCK:
In some ways the speed contest is similar to the RPR and RMR, but there are three five-minute tests. Like the RPR and RMR, one is literary material and one is Q&A. The legal opinion leg is what sets it apart from the RPR and RMR. The speeds are 220 for literary; 230 for LO and 280 for Q&A. The RMR is 200 literary and 260 Q&A.
The word-per-minute count is different as well. The words are counted by syllables. The RPR counts 1.4 syllables as a word. In the speed contest, the actual word spoken is counted as one word. As an example, the word "phenomenal" has four syllables, which would be counted as approximately 2.5 words in the RPR but is one word in the speed contest. You never know what material will show up in the test, and that keeps it interesting. Similar to the RPR/RMR, you qualify with 95% or better; unlike the RPR/RMR, contestants are then ranked according to accuracy.
JUDY WOLF:
This certainly isn’t the first time you entered the speed contest. Tell me about what was different for you this time.
ALAN BROCK:
I won in 2003 and have come in second, third, or fourth most years since then. Taking a speed test is different from day-to-day writing, and to be successful in test-taking, you must understand those differences, plan your test-taking strategy around them, and then practice that strategy. When you are on the job and you hear a sound that you’re not sure of, you can hang back maybe six or seven words until you get the context and then write the word with the rest of the phrase after you understand the word in context. When you are taking a test, the worst thing you can do is to hold back. When you hold back, it creates a tension that causes you consciously to think, "I'm getting behind. I hope a big word doesn't come up soon or I will have a big drop. I'm losing control." You lose the state of clear-headedness and "flow" that you experience when you are writing clearly and cleanly and in control.
A few years ago in the literary portion of the speed contest, I heard “coign of advantage,” but didn’t know the word "coign." It caused an interruption in what had up until then been a smooth-flowing mental process. “What is that word?” I thought. I couldn’t tell if it was a word I knew but didn’t understand the pronunciation of, if it was a word I just didn’t know, or something else. But those conscious thoughts of evaluating what I had just heard, the kind of evaluation we do all the time on the job, stopped me in my tracks during the test and caused me to lose the mental focus on the here and now of test-taking.
In real life, you can just hang back to figure out what the word is and how you are going to write it. What you are looking to do in the contest is the exact opposite. You hear “does the car black” instead of “was the car black." You just write it down. Don’t think about it! You’ll get it later from context when you transcribe. Since doing that is the exact opposite of what we do in real life, we must practice that "just take down whatever you hear and then forget it" state of mind. Having practiced this over and over at home, at the test we then execute what we have practiced and aren't flummoxed by having taken down the wrong word at times.
Preparing for a test means you have to get into a state of complete mental clarity. I practice at home first and foremost for that state of living in the moment as I take the test. Practicing for tests is completely different from working. Think of a great basketball player who practices rituals for sinking a free throw. He walks up to the line. He places himself in an exact stance. Bounces the ball twice. Brushes his forehead with his hand in a certain way. Looks up at the rim. Shoots. Basketball players have rituals that they practice so when they’re in the game it comes naturally and they can then execute well what they have practiced, time after time.
JUDY WOLF:
When you speak of practice, I think about many reporters who struggle to pass tests and advance to the next level. What advice do you have for them?
ALAN BROCK:
Again, practicing is the polar opposite of real-day work. Practicing means going into a mental state where you are writing what you hear. You aren’t going to stop to think about anything. This is mental state that you can only achieve on test day by practicing being in that mental state. It’s about practicing for the test...not practicing for being on the job.
JUDY WOLF:
Moving on to the topic of the writer that you used at the speed contest. What about the Diamante® writer might have contributed to your success?
ALAN BROCK:
It’s not that the Diamante makes you write faster than you already do; rather, what matters is the clarity of feedback that the machine gives you. But let me step back for a moment.
We always are, or always should be, writing realtime on the job - not necessarily interactive realtime for the attorneys, just realtime to the computer for ourselves. It’s a hugely important productivity tool. Reporters are paid by the page. The more efficient we are the more pages we can turn out or the less work we have to do to earn our desired income. It’s that simple. I don’t know any reporters who will say they have plenty of time to do all the things they want to do or more money than they need. Realtime is the productivity tool that can give us more of those precious commodities - time and money.
How does this relate to the Diamante? It’s a great tool to help us make the most of the productivity-enhancing aspects of realtime. On previous writers, you didn’t get this level of tactile feedback about what you were writing. You thought you were writing correctly, but you weren’t always sure because there wasn’t the clear feel that allowed you to know for sure. There was always that feeling you needed to pay more conscious attention to make sure you were getting it down right because of a certain "sponginess" of feel that prevented you for being certain you were getting it right.
With the Diamante what I absolutely love is the sense of feedback I get from it. I clearly feel what it is I’ve stroked. It’s not that I’m necessarily more accurate, but rather that the precision of feel of the Diamante is at a level where I can sense that what it feels like I've written is what I actually have written. It’s important: feel, feedback, clarity. Now, using the Diamante, my hands and my mind can adjust very precisely to write more clearly and completely. I’m not physically as tired or mentally as tired. The level of clarity allows me to feel what went wrong. I can feel when I hit a misstroke. My body makes automatic adjustments. My writing is cleaner as the result of the Diamante. It’s cleaner at the end of the day. The realtime is cleaner. I feel fresher at the end of the day.
Many other Diamante users have told me that they are less tired at the end of the day. Now I’m beginning to understand that it’s not just because the keys are easier to press or there’s less effort from the arms, hands, fingers, but it’s the mental state they experience that’s making them feel better at the end of a long day.
ALAN BROCK:
The physical act of writing on the Diamante is less effortful, but even more important is that the mental processes involved in writing are less strenuous. It’s about not working as hard, physically or mentally. I am a real enthusiast about this machine because of that decrease in effort. At the end of the day, I’m ready to go to the gym. If my running buddy wants to run right after work, I’m okay with that. If he wants to go later, I’m okay with that too. I’ve experienced a much less stressful workday because the Diamante has given me a level of mental clarity that leaves me with more energy when the workday is done.
It’s not just about the physical layout of the machine. The machine certainly has excellent ergonomics. But much more important is the way that it’s brilliantly engineered for the way the user experiences the machine.
JUDY WOLF:
The Diamante and its ‘little sister’ the Wave™ writer, both paperless writers using the same technology, have been broadly embraced by court reporters, CART reporters and captioners. The next frontier is the education community, the schools and students. We’re excited about bringing this technology into more classrooms with the Wave writer.
ALAN BROCK:
Some reporters grieve the loss of the paper. I do know that when I was in school, I depended on the paper because it told me so much about what I was stroking. I could see the big glob of ink in some strokes. I could see where there was only a small mark from my fourth finger instead of a full mark. It showed me what I needed to work on in my fingering technique.
JUDY WOLF:
You may not have heard about TrueView which is a software utility for seeing the same kind of information, and more, from the Diamante and the Wave writers.
ALAN BROCK:
Oh, is that what is called Steno X-Ray™ in Case CATalyst?
JUDY WOLF:
TrueView™ is a standalone version of Steno X-Ray that comes with the Diamante and Wave. It works both in realtime and from the writer memory to show the steno outlines just as they would appear on paper tape. You’ll see the big globs and the slight marks just like you saw them on paper, but you are viewing them on your computer screen. TrueView shows even more than the paper tape could. It shows the order in which the keys came down to make a stroke. It provides a student, or professionals working on their technique, to see where they need to make changes and to practice. I’ll have to show it to you, because it is a superb tool.
ALAN BROCK:
I'll look forward to seeing that. It sounds very exciting.
JUDY WOLF:
Back to your experience with the Diamante: What was your earlier experience with tuning it to your personal writing style?
ALAN BROCK:
Well, I’ve had my Diamante for some time, and I just sent it in for service. So I’ll tell you about my recent experience getting a loaner Diamante, which had little, if any, writing on it before coming to me. My experience with the loaner I think is characteristic of what a reporter experiences in the first few weeks of using the machine.
There are two major adjustment options; stacking/splitting and individual key sensitivity. When the writer arrives, it is set at neutral for stacking/splitting and neutral for key sensitivity. (Again, the loaner writer I received had very few strokes written on it prior to coming to me.) I was able to write about 800 pages before I had an occurrence of a stroke splitting, such as /-E /KWR for what was intended to be one stroke, /KWRE (for "yes") - and this was without making any changes in the machine's splitting/stacking adjustment. My longtime problem has been stacking, such as the "-ted" ending and "to do" (in which, for example, "committing" came out as "commit to do"). With the Diamante, after a stacking/splitting adjustment to reflect my keystroking habits, my stacking occurrences have decreased 70 to 80 percent from the number I had with previous machines.
I’d like to add that the way the Diamante user interface is designed is so easy to use. The menu takes you through everything in a really helpful way.
All of these characteristics of the machine help us get cleaner and cleaner writing, so we turn out a better translation - and that's what it is all about!
JUDY WOLF:
We’ll wrap up now even though I’d love to continue to hear more about your experiences and ideas. We’ll have to continue another time.
ALAN BROCK:
As I have said to John Wenclawski [President of Stenograph] many times, Stenograph should pay me a commission for all the Diamante writers I’ve helped to sell to reporters who have asked for my input into their purchasing decisions. Many reporters have asked my opinion on the Diamante, and I tell them flat out: the Diamante has made me more productive and leaves me with more energy at the end of the day. What more could I ask for from a writer?
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