Caption Colorado captioner wins Texas speed contest

HOUSTON- Caption Colorado stenocaptioner, Dana Smelley, won the 2002 Paul Burris Speed Cup, a real-time/transcribing contest held at the Texas Court Reporters Association (TCRA) annual convention.

Although Smelley is a new part-time hire at Caption Colorado (spring 2002), she is a veteran with the Paul Burris Cup. Participating in both the real-time test and the speed test, she placed first in the real-time contest in 2001, and finished in third place this year.

The competition is a three-part transcription test consisting of five minutes of literary material at 220 WPM, five minutes of legal opinion material at 230 WPM and five minutes of Q&A material at 280 WPM. Originally only a typewriter transcription contest, contestants now have the option to real-time the transcripts.

Several other judging factors are considered with speed, such as accuracy. To qualify, contestants must pass each leg of the competition with an accuracy rating of 95%.

"It's no surprise to me," said Patty White, vice president of operations for Caption Colorado. "She trained very quickly for [Caption Colorado], and has performed well since then, increasing her skills very rapidly."

Smelley, RMR, CRR, CSR, attended Alvin Community College and attained her associate's degree in Applied Science in 1989. She is a certified Level V CART provider in Texas and helped formulate the CART certification test for Texas in 1998. Currently vice president of public relations for the TCRA, Smelley has been a member of NCRA since 1988, and now owns a full-service court-reporting firm that she opened in 1993. Caption Colorado is the only company she has worked for as a captioner.