Court reporting programs prepare people to record and transcribe formal proceedings. Students learn to capture words at a high rate of speed on a stenotype machine. They also learn real-time reporting, legal and medical terms, and how to use computers.

Do you ever have trouble taking notes when someone is giving a rapid-fire lecture? Think of what court reporters must do: they must record every word, not just notes. When you study court reporting, you develop your skills until you can record accurately at a very high speed, over 225 words per minute.

You learn to capture speech so rapidly because you use a stenotype machine that creates a kind of shorthand. Different schools have different theories of how to represent speech sounds as shorthand, and you begin your training by learning this theory. Then you start to build your speed with the machine.

You also learn how to feed this shorthand to a computer program that translates it into English, and how to clean up the English that is produced. You study English grammar and punctuation so that you can clean up the English appropriately. A lot of the English used in courtrooms is filled with legal and medical terminology, so you study these terms and learn what reference books to consult about them.

You can study court reporting in a program that lasts two or four years. About 75 schools offer such a program. But you are probably well advised to choose from the 60 or so that are approved by the National Court Reporters Association. They are mostly community colleges and proprietary schools.

Have you have ever seen closed-captioning appearing on television during a live event? Then you have seen another kind of work that may be open to you when you complete this program. The work also is helpful for students or other people attending lectures who have impaired hearing. The stenotype machine is connected directly to the computer while you are doing input. That allows the translation into English to happen with only the slightest delay. This is called Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART). You usually study procedures for CART as part of your training.