Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 April 1881 — How Mistakes are Made. [ARTICLE]

How Mistakes are Made.

Al the dinner ofthe Chicago Press Club, John Ritchie, the stenographer, made a little speech of which the following is a part: *There are times, however, when even the most expert stenographer wants more time. Not long ago I saw a reporter taking a lecture on the Abencki tribe of Indians, in which occurred the name of the powerful sachem, Choppegogmagcochkamuggin. Just imagine that thing fired oil at an unsuspecting American citizen, and conceive if you can, the mental wreck left behind when that orthographical cyclone rumbled by! The practice of stenography is the sawing “wood of intellect. It is the cultivation of detail, so that exact words are remembered in their consecutive order, but very often at the sacrifice of ability to grasp the the thought contained in those words. There is a dangerous temptation in this direction, because of the difficulty of running simultaneously two trains of thought; and if the stenographer fails to fight down this tendency he loses his individuality as a thinking, reflecting human being, and degenerates into a baldheaded, shorthand factory, ready to step into his intellectual grave. Common sense and general information have about as much to do with accuracy in stenography, as in long hand. In rapid writing, characters representing entirely different words will often look very much alike, and the reporter sometimes fails to detect in his notes little pieces of skullduggery that lead him into frightful mistakes. I have known stenographers binder whose heroic treatment the “ Sermon on the Mount” would read like a chapter from “Rattlesnake Dick, the Ringtailed Screamer of the Rocky Mountains.” I confess that I myself once reported a eulogistic address in which were the Words, “His brow was enwreathed with celestial wisdomand when I came to convert it into long hand.the notes looked up into my face with impudent rectitude,and made the speaker say, “His <

bread was enriched with a stump tai 1 hard pan.” That was simply .a case of similarity of outline.