Five winning stories will be selected by a panel of judges, and the winning entrants will each receive an Amazon Kindle 2 as well as Dragon NaturallySpeaking upgrades for three years.
Once upon a time, long ago, when I took my first deposition as a court reporter, I prepared the transcript using a manual typewriter and onionskin paper. If I made a typo, I started the page over, and over, and over. Electric was better and when electric typewriters became memory-capable, I knew it would never get any better. I bought my first computer while doing the civil case of Westmoreland v. CBS and carried three very large, very heavy, cases (base, monitor and printer) around the country to do discovery depositions. At the time it was high technology, well worth the struggle through airports. Then along came DRAGON. Dragon truly is high technology. It’s accurate, it’s easy. It’s portable. DRAGON Legal works great in the courtroom. It saves an incredible amount of time in that transcripts are produced real-time by dictating via stenomask directly into a laptop computer. A couple of years ago, I demonstrated real-time voice writing at the South Carolina State Court Reporters Association’s convention while a fellow reporter demonstrated stenotype for our stenotype reporters. This demonstration was remarkable in the level of accuracy but truly remarkable in that I had only installed the then-newly-released Dragon Naturally Speaking, Version 9, twenty minutes earlier! And now there is Version 10. A long, long way from onionskin.