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Profiled in The JCR Weekly!

One of the many things that makes Poetic Justice unique is that its characters and storyline are inspired by my work as a court reporter. During those years, my main source of support for a myriad of resources—education, certifications, insurance—was the National Court Reporters Association. The NCRA is an internationally recognized organization with over 14,000 members and is dedicated to supporting the careers of stenographers, captioners, and legal videographers. They were kind enough to profile me and my novel in their weekly online trade publication, The Journal of Court Reporting. I’d like to share that interview with you, and I hope it brings insight into how the novel came to life as well as the profession that inspired the tale.

Click the “JCR” image below to find the interview online.

What is a Court Reporter?

A court reporter, court stenographer, stenotypist, shorthand reporter, captioner, CART reporter, or deposition reporter all use the same skill: MACHINE SHORTHAND.

Anyone who’s had jury duty has surely been captivated by the person who sits at the front of the courtroom taking down the verbatim record of the trial proceedings. We call that person a court reporter or court stenographer. The skill these highly trained professionals use is known as machine shorthand, or the method of using a stenotype to convert the spoken word into an abbreviated language that can later be converted back into English. This method allows information to be easily archived and later translated for readback or publication. This skill is also used for broadcast captioning or realtime translation services for the deaf and hearing impaired—also known as Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART).

Court reporters are keeps of the official record because they provide an impartial role within the legal process whether that be as deposition reporters during the discovery phase of litigation or providing trial transcripts for appeal. While the term “court reporter” is used universally to describe all of the aforementioned occupations, you may find these professionals on the Congressional floor or at a news press conference.

According to Stenograph, the industry leader in court reporting products, “Miles Bartholomew invented the first successful shorthand machine in 1877. Improvements were later made to the machine and patents were obtained for it in 1879 and 1884. It was manufactured by Bartholomew’s company, the United States Stenograph Corporation of East St. Louis, Illinois, and was used as late as 1937 by official reporters. The ten keys could be depressed one at a time (a letter at a stroke) to create a series of dots and dashes, much like Morse code.”

Modern stenography machines have abandoned the concept of singular finger depression in favor of allowing the user to combine multiple keys into one stroke. In addition, today’s machines have been expanded to 22 keys with an optional number bar. This differs vastly from the QWERTY keyboard on your computer because in machine shorthand words are formed phonetically by selecting several keys in combination, reminiscent of playing a chord on the piano, allowing the stenographer to hit speeds of 225 wpm or faster.

And yet, people often wonder why court reporters exist in our high-tech world. Isn’t there a voice-recognition software that makes this 150-year old art obsolete? Sure. But voice recognition can only handle one voice at a time. If several people speak at once or talk over each other, it becomes difficult to separate the language. Besides, voice recognition isn’t as accurate, especially when it comes to accented speakers, and it often fails to meet the level of consistency that comes with having someone in the room to ask for clarification, to slow things down if conversations get jumbled, or to prompt voices that go too low for the microphone. Depending on state guidelines, court reporters are trained to a 95 to 98 percent degree of accuracy on proceedings of two to four voices (although stenographers can do more as needed). Plus, court reporters have the ability to provide realtime feeds to those in the proceeding so that participants can view the words being captured in the moment.

To learn more about court reporting visit the National Court Reporters Association or read about the fictionalized life of a court reporter in the Victoria Justice Court Reporter Mystery Series.

Join Me for the Cozy Ink Podcast Summer Conference

Want a ton of FREE publication advice on everything from popular cozy mystery themes to querying and the business of book marketing?

Then join me on Saturday, August 1, 2020, at the Cozy Ink Podcast Writer’s Conference. The event starts at 10:00 a.m. (Central Time) and will take place entirely online so that you can work from home at your own pace. At 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, I will cover the topic of “Dialogue in Fiction Writing,” expanding upon many of the ideas covered in my “Eight Dialogue Do’s” as seen below.

Here is the full list of speakers set for the event* thus far:

10:00 a.m. – Opening: Building a Brand – Leah Bailey, Jackie Layton, & Laina Turner

10:45 a.m. – Jackie Layton: Shifting Points of View

11:00 a.m. – Laina Turner: Writing as a Business

11:30 a.m. – J.C. Kenney: The Writing Process

12:00 p.m. – Kathleen Marple Kalb: Querying and Rejection

12:30 p.m. – Teresa Trent: Creating Lovable Characters

12:45 p.m. – Linda Norlander: Setting as a Character

1:00 p.m. – C.L. Bauer: Plotting Cozy Mysteries

1:30 p.m. – Nicole Asselin: Writing While Working

1:50 p.m. – Leah Bailey: Writing Short Stories

2:10 p.m. – Marilyn Levinson: Themes in Cozy Mysteries

2:30 p.m. – Andrea J. Johnson: Writing Dialogue

3:00 p.m. – James R. Mathis: Plotting versus Pantsing

3:30 p.m. – Heather Weidner: Social Media for the Writer

4:00 p.m. – Closing: Overcoming Obstacles for Authors – Leah Bailey, Jackie Layton, & Laina Turner

*Please note that the event will start 10:00 a.m. Central Time (that’s 11:00 a.m. Eastern and 8:00 a.m. Pacific).

Leah Bailey, Laina Turner, and Jackie Layton will co-host the opening and closing of the event, so it is bound to be fun and informative. You can register for the free event online HERE. Or if you need more information or want an updated schedule, visit the Cozy Ink Podcast website.

Free Workshop: Three Steps to a Killer Cozy

Want to learn more about how to write a killer cozy? Join me for a FREE weekend intensive starting Friday, September 11, 2020, as part of the 9th Annual Savvy Authors Online Writers Conference. This session will help you use three simple questions to kick start a killer cozy community crawling with crimes, kooky characters, comedy, and a crafty cliffhanger that will leave your readers dying for more. Since we also want audiences to care about the crime, understand the motivation of our detective, and remain stumped until the final page, we’ll also cover the basics of mystery plotting, pacing, clue placement, and characterization—then top it all off with a hands-on exercise where the participants create a mystery plot from scratch!

Remember, cozies are traditional mysteries that contain no explicit sex, excessive gore, or gratuitous violence, and take place in a communal setting containing characters who know one another. This subgenre of mystery has become wildly popular today because they include an amateur sleuth whose profession aids in the solution of the crime, thereby giving the audience a level of plot accessibility not available with a technique-driven detective at the helm—such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. This open communication between author, reader, and gumshoe gives the cozy audience an opportunity to solve the caper alongside the investigator, making this a smart subgenre to learn if you’d like to attract a wide audience.

To learn more about how to take my FREE class, “Three Steps to a Killer Cozy,” go to SavvyAuthors and signup today! Don’t worry if you don’t have the whole weekend free. Participants can work at their own pace.

Easy Online Research Tips

Web research is an integral part of our due diligence as writers. Whether you write nonfiction or fiction, the accuracy of your data can make or break a story. Unfortunately, search engines like Google don’t always understand questions formatted in standard English. Therefore, our internet research success depends on how well the program is able to translate our phrases into relevant results. Maximize Google’s research potential by using search operators between keywords to define the inquiry and narrow the search. The most common search operators are “OR” “site:” and “link:” Web surfers who use these operators gain results faster than the average user, so streamline your research by becoming familiar with how each operator works.

1) “OR”

Use OR to separate your keywords, and you’ll find pages that contain one or all of your search criteria.

For example: cat OR kitty OR kitten

2) site:

Use your keywordsplus site: followed by a domain name to search for information within a single website.

For example: airport interviews site: tmz.com

This is a search for airport interviews on the tmz.com site.

3) link:

Use link: to find pages that link to other pages.

For example: link: fundsforwriters.com

This search finds pages linked to fundsforwriters.com.

Google also lets you use punctuation to narrow a search. Here are the most common uses of punctuation in search queries.

1) Double Quotation Marks

Surround a phrase with quotation marks (e.g. “Birdbox Challenge”), and Google will search for your keywords in the order they appear within the phrase.

2) Exclude a Word

To exclude a certain word, place a minus symbol in front of the word you wish to exclude.

For example: Aladdin –Smith

This will bring up results about the story, film, play, or cartoon that don’t include Will Smith. Remember, your search query must go first then the minus sign followed by the word or words to omit. Make sure there are no spaces between the minus symbol and the word or phrase you’d like to exclude.

3) Replace a Letter

Use the asterisk to replace one or more letters in a word. For example, placing drag rac* into the search engine returns results that include the words drag race and drag racing.

If the search operators prove too challenging, use Google’s Advanced Search. The advanced search provides specific options to narrow your query. Most people make the mistake of starting their web research with broad keywords. As a result, they end up with pages upon pages of material to sort through. To avoid this, start by identifying the most specific words for your subject and select one of Google’s advance search options to refine your results. Here’s how some of them work:

“all these words” = The results will contain all the words you type in an input box, but not always in the order that you type them.

“this exact word or phrase” =The results will contain the exact phrase or wording that you type into an input box.

“any of these” = The results will contain at least one of the words that you type into an input box.

“none of these” = The results will exclude the words that you type into an input box.

You can narrow your results further by specifying language, region, or the last update. Users can also search for specific file types such as .pdf or .xls.

Since one erroneous statement can destroy a writer’s credibility, authors must develop fast and accurate ways to research information online. If you’re looking for additional internet research techniques, consider reading Mastering Online Research by Maura D. Shaw or How to Find out Anything by Don MacLeod.

Find this helpful? Let me hear what you have to say below.

Six Writing Tips In Infographics

Writing about writing is a ton of fun, but not everyone learns through lectures. Some of us are visual learners. So I thought I’d share some of the infographics I have created over the years. Please enjoy and share, but give credit to the site. Also, leave a comment if you find any of these tips helpful or if you have questions. I’d love to further the conversation on these subjects.

For more information on how to capture violence in a scene, try my “Five Cutthroat Tips for Writing Killer Action” or consider how description can play a role in whether the audience gains pain or pleasure from your scene.

Description or setting is the first aspect of making a scene memorable for the reader, but here’s some advice to help move past the first step and into a cycle that will make your scene sing.

What’s the key ingredient missing in the infographic above? That’s right DIALOGUE. But don’t worry, I’ve got you covered with eight steps that will put yours in the stratosphere. Hear more about what I have to say on this subject on the Cozy Ink Podcast (coming soon)!