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Learning Stenography

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antistic edited this page Jun 23, 2021 · 88 revisions

Stenography was traditionally taught in schools, and still is today. However, because of Open Steno, there are increasingly self-taught stenographers. Plover has everything you need to teach yourself stenography.

Table of Contents

Overview

  • Start learning stenography theory for free. See the Stenography theory section.
  • Practice writing using stenography through drills and exercises. See the Practice writing using stenography section.
  • Learn extra tools to assist you along the journey. See the tools section.
  • Learn common terminology that comes up in steno materials. See this Wiki's Glossary.

If you find other useful resources along the way, edit this wiki page to add them.

Tutorial / Textbook / Drills

Stenography theory

These sites aim to teach you steno theory, from the layout to the terminology to the strokes.

  • Learn Plover! (EPUB, PDF)

    Learn Plover! is a free online textbook by Zack Brown, based on his steno tutoring sessions with Mirabai Knight. It offers a step-by-step introduction to Plover for beginners, with practice material at the end of every chapter. The accompanying exercises are available online in several places, notably Steno Jig and Typey Type. See the Practice writing using stenography section.

  • The Art of Chording

    The Art of Chording is a textbook that aims to guide the student through their stenography learning by providing a broad amount of knowledge from the first lesson on. The goal is to get students writing real words and sentences as quickly as possible and then delve into the minutiae of how to write with Plover's default dictionary quickly and without conflict. It includes additional sections on approaches borrowed from other steno theories that can be found in Plover's default dictionary.

Practice writing using stenography

  • Qwerty Steno

    Qwerty Steno is a fantastic resource which has a tutorial on steno theory written by Mike Neale of the Open Steno community.

  • The Steno Grind

    The Steno Grind provides interactive drills for any combination of exercises from The Art of Chording.

  • Steno Jig

    Steno Jig has a wide variety of words, sentences, etc that you can practice with optional stroke suggestions. There are several beginner drills, and a large set of vocabulary words, and sentence practice drills that you can work through to gradually learn the top 8,000 most used words. It has Learn Plover! drills with stroke hints and lookahead display.

  • Typey Type for Stenographers

    Type Type for Stenographers is a drilling and learning resource with a fair amount of practice material and detailed quantitative feedback. It includes lessons that follow the Learn Plover! book and lets you upload your own practice material. It also has dictionaries, flashcards, recommendations on how much of which lesson to do next, a break timer, a lookup tool, and a diagram generator.

  • Plover Dojo

    A lovely visual approach to learning the keyboard and basic chords, using a standard QWERTY keyboard, by JR, Jay Liu, and Myrntillae Nash.

  • Top 100 Words in Plover's Dictionary

    Just a small tutorial covering the top 100 English words according to Wikipedia. Many of them are briefs and this text gives some insight as to why these strokes are the way they are.

Tools

You might consider enabling some of the built-in tools, especially the paper tape so you can see which keys Plover thinks you're pressing. Once you're familiar with the layout and can write things the way they're pronounced and fingerspell those you can't, you might also want to enable the strokes suggestions tool.

Dictation

If you want to eventually caption speakers, you will need to be able to take dictation.

  • Steno Arcade Steno Arcade is a project funded by the Open Steno Project, developed by For All To Play. It contains Steno Hero, a game where you write lyrics in time with a singer and get graded on accuracy. You can create custom song files for use in the game by using wavelyric.

  • YouTube

    YouTube videos will offer a good start for dictation. You can find dictations on YouTube, as well as material designed for ESL students, and speeches by your favorite speaker.

  • Television

    Try captioning your favorite TV show once you are able to. Nature documentaries are especially good for beginners because they tend to have long pauses between dialogue.

  • Pitman London

    Pitman London has a page of dictation for people learning pen shorthand. The dictation ranges in speed from 40WPM to 130WPM.

  • Court Reporting Help

    CRH has some free dictation posts. Especially useful is the Magic Drill, for beginners and experts alike.

  • englishlearning.webgarden.es

    This repository of ESL resources has some simple texts with slow dictation. In particular, "Easy Reading Texts" for 1st and 2nd year students and "Reading Texts" for 3rd and 4th year students tend to be dictated at around 100 WPM.

  • www.stenolife.com

    Many short pieces are available across a wide range of speeds. Making an account is required.

  • www.ev360ultimate.com

    A repository with longer pieces and guided practice sessions. Making an account is required.

Volunteer Projects Needing Transcription

Flashcard decks

See Using Anki for Learning Stenography

Other Typing Sites

Sites not made for steno are not ideal for use with Plover, but they offer good quality practice material for the intermediate stenographer, or to judge your skills with a metric.

Depending on the site, you might want to adjust Plover's spacing setting (before or after).

  • TypiNation

    Multiplayer typing game with a stenography user option. Has a mode to show steno strokes for each word based on the Plover default dictionary.

  • TypeRacer Now bans steno users who show up in leaderboards, a sudden flip after years of steno users being allowed on the site

    Online realtime typing competition.

  • keyma.sh

    Multiplayer typing website with a stenography world and public racing rooms.

  • 10 Fast Fingers Bans steno users who break 100WPM

    Short test of most common words.

  • monkeytype Some steno users have reported having their scores not saved as they were detected as bot-like

    Typing game with many different modes, including copy practice, timed practice, and quotes.

    You may want to change some settings for steno input to work well:

    setting name setting
    freedom mode on
    strict space on
    stop on error off
    confidence mode off
    quick end off

Cheat sheets

Quick image and text references.

Plover Wiki — Open Steno Project — Plover Homepage

Plover

Stenography

The Steno Community

In-Browser Demo

Other Pages

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