Thoughts on stenography in the context of computer text input

Offtopic: «stenography» as an insult is widespread and needs to stop

Created Tuesday 17 February 2026

I see a lot of times dirtbag-left and dirtbag-centre commentarians calling irresponsible verbatim reporting stenography. The analogy is that a stenographer solely provides a transscript, whereas a journalist (who may also be a stenographer in the sense of taking shorthand notes) is able to and responsible to provide their own commentary. This is an insult to court reporters, CART providers, realtime transscriptionists and hobby stenographers worldwide. You are speaking of «uncritical reporting» («verbatim reporting» is the neutral term).

You'll never hear a stenographer use «stenography» as an insult unless they did so before they became a stenographer.

(No, this page wasn't typed up stenographically. I'm still only 2.5 days into trying to learn Lapwing, as part of my amateur HCI research - I can't use it to do anything yet.)

Examples on Mastodon alone:
mastodon.social/@jeffjarvis/115905867978451970
mastodon.green/@CiaraNi/115946039828677444
hachyderm.io/@aburka/116041473800286804
hear-me.social/@nek/116027009973051269
mastodon.social/@dangillmor/116015249389077369
mastodon.social/@WarnerCrocker/115984568843904037