Typing Symbols

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 259, 29 July 1937, Page 7

Typing Symbols

An American Stenotypist Builds Up Her Success on New Invention rtLOSE to the platform at many of the large conventions in the United States there is a little threelegged machine with a few keys like a small typewriter and a huge roll of paper, on which every word that is said is clicked forth in symbols. The chances are that the operator of the machine will be a calm, serene, grey-eyed woman who never is known to frown or be flurried, no matter how late at night it may be, or how early in the morning after the late night. Ask Mrs. Fanny Sweeney, president of the Master Reporting Company, how it is that she is able to click on so steadily' in spite of interrupted conversations and cross-currents in debatesand she will tell you that when she decided to graduate herself from being a stenographer to being a stenotypist she had to keep on with the old work by day in order to pay for a course in the new. Evenings were her only opportunity to work up speed on the stenotype. So she set up.her little machine in the family living-room and recorded all the conversation. When some one congratulates her today on her ability, Mrs. Sweeney says. “It all goes back to the evenings when my parents and the rest of the family were talking fast and were impolite enough to interrupt one another. They didn’t realise it. but they were helping me toward professional proficiency.” Mrs. Sweeney is able to point out the qualities which have helped her to build a successful business, with her employees scurrying throughout the United States and even to many parts of Europe. How She Kept a Job. CUE was just 15, with a brand new diploma from a secretarial school, when she applied for her first job. The editor whom she approached was dubious about her youth and inexperience. Mrs. Sweeney in her turn was cheerily persistent, apparently confident in herself, and she won the job. But she kept it by being conscious of the need to enlarge her slender vocabulary and to increase the speed with which she could set down accurately the cascades of polished English which poured so readily from her employer’s lips.' Her serene manner gave no hint of her concern and neither then nor since has she acknowledged limitations in her chosen field. Rut every evening sli" sat up with a dictionary and never even now is she without a textbook on her. desk and a library close at hand by which she constantly enlarges her knowledge. When she onened her first office /of her own at the age of 18 she noticed that many transcribers turned in loose sheets, indifferently typed and with many erasures. She decided to establish standards. Every renort going out from her office was in a neat, attractive binder, with meticulously even margins and no erasures.

Like other successful people Mrs. Sweeney is without business jealousy. 'She- believes that there is opportunity enough and to spare for everyone who is genuinely qualified and that she has a responsibility for helping right persons achieve the opportunities which await them.