Saturday, July 30, 2011

"Stroke Intensive" Theories: Sten Ed vs. Phoenix

If you're like me, you wonder which stenograph theory is the best.  I'm not interested in learning a stenograph theory which is considered "slow" or "inadequate" and which will only hinder me in the end.

Of course my ultimate goal as a court reporting student is to reach the goal of 225 WPM.  I was impressed with Mark Kislingbury's Magnum Steno Web Page.  Basically, your can only increases your steno writing speed by writing faster (increasing your strokes per second) and/or writing shorter (decreasing your strokes per word).  Note that hesitation is another major factor in writing speed and affects your strokes per second.

The Sten Ed and the Phoenix stenograph theories are taught in about 75% of the court reporting schools.  Basically, Sten Ed and Phoenix are both considered "stroke intensive."  In fact, it seems like most stenograph theories are called or considered "stroke intensive," and the only non stroke intensive theory seems to be Magnum Steno.  However, the Magnum Steno theory has been called "memory intensive" because it uses numerous "briefs" to reduce the number of strokes.

Well, let me answer the question: Which theory is more stroke intensive, Sten Ed or Phoenix?  The simple answer, based on the raw theory, is Sten Ed.  The Sten Ed appears to be approximately 11.5% more stroke intensive than the Phoenix theory. However, let me point out a few things.  (Note that I base my results on the article "Steno Comparison Chart").

  1. The Phoenix theory required 166 less strokes for the 683 comparable words.  Approximately 95 strokes (57%) were due to how inflected endings are incorporated into the stroking (see #2).  Approximately 65 strokes (39%) were due to how suffixes are written.
  2. Sten Ed follows the NCRA Guidelines of adding the plural of a word (-es, -s) in a separate stroke. The Phoenix theory allows for adding the plural of a word in the same stroke in certain cases or for certain suffixes.  I counted 63 of the "saved" 95 inflected ending strokes were due to this.   
  3. Not all Phoenix words had less strokes.  Twenty-two (22) Sten Ed words (3.2%) had fewer strokes.  Most of which were due to how suffixes are written.  
The most common suffix (about 31% of words with suffixes) is the inflected plural ending (-es, -s), so changing how this is stroked can significantly impact how "Stroke intensive" the theory is.  Because this can be a big factor, let's remove the plural ending component from the analysis.  The result now is that Sten Ed appears to be approximately 5.3% more stroke intensive than the Phoenix theory.




 

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing such great info!

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  2. Not sure what this does for me considering my community college uses StenEd. I'm only in week 17 and am just now discovering the "exceptions" to the StenEd Theory rules. But is it better to memorize less and follow the audible theory of StenEd? YES! Software takes care of spelling, etc. On the few times that Eclipse by Advantage Software can not understand your notes you can edit them. Using the phonetic system works great. I will also go for the MagnumSteno after I have reached 120wpm in speed building (about 8 months from now).

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