Useful tips on how to prepare and compete at Intersteno world-championships

1. Everything you’ve always wanted to know about the summary-reporting competition Instructions for competitors and correctors

2. Its full name is: correspondence and summary-reporting competition. It is a practically oriented competition, connected with the daily work of secretaries and management assistants.

3. Participation in this competition is open to competitors using graphic shorthand, machine shorthand (stenotype or regular keyboard) or voice writing with speech recognition. To participate, you should have a writing speed of at least 150 syllables a minute.

8. Two skills are needed... Not only does the competition consist of two parts, a competitor must also have two skills at his disposal: a) the ability to record and transcribe verbatim; b) the ability to summarize: to select and transcribe the main points from a dictated text.

9. How to summarize? Summarizing starts with understanding what a speech or article is all about and then saying this in the shortest way possible. “The shortest way possible” means that other people must be able to understand your summary!

10. Example of a summary Dictation: When we use the expression “personal finance”, we are talking about the financial situation of a single individual or a single family, and we are referring to income, expenses, savings and debts. People who are experts in this field are called "personal-finance professionals". It is their job to look at how individuals or families earn their money and make everyday and long-term decisions about spending it. In addition these professionals advise on the way in which individuals or families can keep their expenditures in line with their income, so as to prevent them from acquiring too high a burden of all kinds of debts. Summary: 1. Personal finance has to do with the financial situation of a single individual or family. 2. Personal-finance professionals look at how people earn and spend their money. 3. They advise on how to keep one's expenditures in line with one's income, 4. so as to avoid high debts.

11. How is your work evaluated? Your work consists of a verbatim transcription and a summary. The evaluation deals with both these elements: 1) The verbatim part (the letter and the titles of the text to be summarized) is corrected and evaluated in the same way as other shorthand transcriptions. 2) A model summary is used for the evaluation of your summary. We look to what extent the sentences of this model are represented in your summary. For every match, credit points are allotted (at most 100 points in all).

12. AUXILIARY FORM for the correspondence and summary-reporting competition Intrinsic evaluation of the summary *) The maximum number of credit points that goes with each paragraph of the model summary is spread over its key phrases. Each time the summary of a competitor matches (80% - 100%) the meaning of a key phrase, all the points of this key phrase are allotted. A defective match (20% - 80%) gives you half the points. **)The number of words used by the competitor for his/her summary of each paragraph without its heading. If this number is higher than the allowed number of words, then the exceeding number of words is considered as superfluous (resulting in penalty points).