posted 12/09/2024

the joy of writing at 30 wpm

chances are that if you’ve heard of stenography it’s in the context of it being a way to write things really fast. that’s fair — that is the primary purpose of it — but i wanted to talk about writing slowly

for perspective, professional stenographers need to hit 225 wpm to graduate. while working, they may need to be even faster to match the maximum speed that most people can understand audio — around 270 wpm. audiobooks are generally slower to account for the density of the text and for accessibility — around 150 wpm. a fast typist can type over 100 wpm. an average typist can type around 40 wpm.

let’s talk about going slower than that.

if you start learning stenography, you’ll be really slow. you will be slower than even a hunt and peck typist, because not only do you have to hunt for all of your letters, you have to coordinate your hands to press them all at the same time

this makes the word "hot"

if you were like me you will have tried the first lesson on typey type and realised that it’s agonising to concentrate on this for more than two minutes at a time. you will be going at 5 wpm at best, and realise that it’ll take you 20 minutes to finish this first lesson and maybe you should have limited the word count before you started. (ant lore: this experience is why i suggested the site have a little thing at the bottom estimating how long the lesson will take before you start, and diana was very lovely about putting that in)

you can’t even write all of the one-syllable words that you learned as a 5-year-old, because many letters are actually written with a combination of letters, such as TK being “d”, -BG meaning “k”, EU meaning “i”.

PWEUG makes "big"

PWREUPBLG makes "bridge"

it turns out there’s a bunch of rules you have to learn. what letters are, why there’s duplicate keys, valid orders for letters, how to deal with homophones or words that are spelled similarly, how to write multisyllabic words, special shortcuts for very common words, etc. etc.

you’ll make it to 10 wpm, decide you’re ready to move on to the next lesson and be back at 5 wpm and getting confused about how to write words you thought you knew.

but eventually, you’ll start to get the hang of the rules. you’ll write your first word that you were never explicitly taught but made sense from the rules, and be amazed that it didn’t output garbage raw steno but the word you wanted.

you’ll find out that you know enough words that you can start writing messages to your friends

it’ll still be frustrating. you’ll spend ages trying to work out how to write “equilibrium”, before giving up and painstakingly fingerspelling it into the lookup window, looking at all the suggestions trying to work out which ones make sense for you

at some point, perhaps around the time you manage to reliably hit 30 wpm, it clicks. you’ll understand the different prefixes and suffixes and ways to crush syllables. there’ll be words you write and find you really enjoy the way they’re written.

you see words out in the wild and you think how could i write that? and suddenly there’s a little bit more joy you can find while waiting at the bus stop.

you’re still slow. you’re at 30wpm instead of your usual 80wpm, and that’s before factoring the time you take looking up how to form new kinds of words. but each press of your keys gives you a kind of joy that more than makes up for it. you’ve got a new kind of understanding and appreciation and you don’t really know how to explain to other people what you’re experiencing

is it worth learning stenography to write faster? if you counted up the hours you spent learning against what you saved by being faster, it probably wouldn’t be worth it. if you learn as a hobbyist you might not even end up being able to write that fast, just about barely matching your typing speed. if speed is your concern, i think the answer for most people will be no

but there’s reasons to learn things beyond being productive. i think even if i were still toddling about at 30 wpm it would still have been worth learning. there’s a joy in reaching the part in learning where you kind of get it, enough that it leaves its own little mark on how you see the rest of the world.