Friday, June 5

 I am the stay-at-home mum of two lovely children, who are now four and eight years old. Before children, I worked in Data Management for the pharmaceutical industry and the police, being lucky enough in the former to use both of my uni degrees (Biological Science and Japanese). Having now had a few years' break from work, I had the opportunity to rethink my career path, and I've decided to become a stenographer. This blog will be a diary to record my progress :-).

I already have some experience with steno. When I first looked into it, I started by going through the learning modules of Plover. They are free, and the Plover community is a wonderful resource, and a great way to find out whether you like steno enough to do it as a career. After that, I enrolled in Australia's only remaining steno school, the National College of Court Reporting (NCCR). I have spent the past eight months learning their theory, and have just decided to make a change, and instead write a theory called Phoenix. This theory comes from the US, and was rewritten from scratch using phonetic principles. It is a comprehensive and robust theory, and the one written by one of steno's superstars, Jade King. I am thrilled that she is letting me call her my 'mentor' as I navigate this new path :-).

 I have a feeling that this post is a bit dry! I am writing it using the steno machine that I got yesterday (a Stentura 400 SRT that was very generously given to me - I can still hardly believe it!), and looking up how to write things constantly. It's hard to maintain a train of thought at this snail's pace!!

 I am expecting the new Phoenix theory book to arrive next week, and can hardly wait :-). In the meantime, I am taking some advice that Jade wrote on her Stenoquery Facebook group, and working on my fingerspelling speed...

 On TypeRacer today, I was able to fingerspell at a whopping 13wpm! Yes, definitely room to improve there. Oh well, I guess I had to start somewhere...

 The other thing I want to use this blog for is to document words that I think might need Australian pronunciation added. Today I found 'data' is TKAEUT/AU but not TKAT/AU. The Macquarie lists both, so I added the second.

 Okay, my four-year-old is very bored with all this steno, so that's all for now :-).

 Ros