PART IV.
Pointers About Reporting
HOW TO BECOME A SHORTHAND REPORTER.
"Verbatim reporting," writes Mr. William E. Finnegan in Chat, "like everything else worth knowing, is easy when you know how, but the beginner who is afraid of hard work will never know how, for the art of reporting is not easily mastered. Therein lies its chief value. If the ability to follow accurately a rapid speaker could be absorbed as a sponge takes up water, the stenographic profession would soon be filled with the failures from every other department of work. Fortunately he who would become a verbatim reporter must, far from absorbing the knowledge he seeks, dig for every morsel of it—dig deep through strata of principles beset with difficulties, which only the patient, industrious and resourceful mind can hope to overcome. . . . . . Whoever is ambitious to become a verbatim reporter must not make the fatal error of being in too great a hurry. He must be willing to spend time enough to learn the art of shorthand thoroughly. If he trusts his reporting fortunes to an instructor who guarantees to turn out experts in three months his
108
