I got my new minute already. I really liked the strategy of starting at a slower speed. I think what worked for me was telling myself I wasn't allowed to move on until I was "comfortable" writing it, as opposed to just shooting for 95% accuracy. The minute was also only at 220 wpm, which is the speed RTC claims the entire piece is, and the speed at which I actually want to practice.
I decided to try getting a tripod for the LS, and today was the first time I used it. It was actually really nice not having to balance anything on my lap. It felt much more sturdy that way, and I think it's going to work out.
I have another list of potential word-boundary conflicts: cast, going, grade, heart, ward, stream, wind, bridge, found, wax, bound, rail, nail, comb, fill, hole, room, pile, mill, fare, house, made, and bulb. And there were a few words that only presented problems in one instance: printwheel, standstill, and handshake. I can't believe anyone would have STAND\STIL defined as one word! There were a lot of instances for "-house" and "-room" especially. I also changed "board" to BAORD a while ago, but I never went back and put asterisks in for "-board" or even fixed all instances of BORD, apparently, so I took care of that.
When I got to "-nk" in the Phoenix drills, I realized I never practiced doing FRNG instead of *NG. I started trying to think of the finger formation as "-nk" instead of thinking of words as, for example, DRAFRNG. That's what you're always supposed to do, but there are a lot of instances where I never quite got there. PB I think of as N, of course, and TK as D, etc., but for a lot of the other stuff, like IFM for "-ism," I'm still thinking "IFM." "-nk" words were dramatically easier to stroke once I started thinking of the position instead of the keys, so hopefully I can apply that to other aspects as well.
11.6
I finally got the two minutes together that I was working on. It only took me 7 weeks. Way longer than it should have, but I just can't get the positioning right. It's like when you type on someone else's keyboard. On your keyboard, you can type 100 wpm. On an unfamiliar keyboard, suddenly you're knocked down to 60. I feel like I've been writing on someone else's steno machine for the past 8 months, and it hasn't gotten any more familiar than it was on the very first day.
I decided to go back to my old teacher's strategy of speedbuilding: learn the minute at a slow speed, then bump it up a speed until you're comfortable with that, and then bump it up one last time to your goal speed. I don't know what kind of progress I'll make with that strategy, but for now I'm liking writing at 180 wpm.
I'm down to 8,440 entries with "B" in them that might need inflected endings added. I figured out a lot of ways to weed out things that weren't verbs, like looking at words that end in "y" or "s" or whatnot. I've also continued finding word parts that need to be asterisked: bone, stroke, nose, son, late, lock, hand, time, foot, wear, print, note, step, land, head, walk, and hold.
I ran into particularly tedious problems with "out-" and "sub-". The old StenEd "out-" is O*UT, which is my "-out," so I had to move the asterisks in those outlines from the first stroke to the second one. I don't like the idea of "sub" and "sub-" being the same outline, so I had to add an asterisk to all the strokes that come after "sub-" (or at least the ones that are words on their own), like "submarine" and whatnot.
I decided to go back to my old teacher's strategy of speedbuilding: learn the minute at a slow speed, then bump it up a speed until you're comfortable with that, and then bump it up one last time to your goal speed. I don't know what kind of progress I'll make with that strategy, but for now I'm liking writing at 180 wpm.
I'm down to 8,440 entries with "B" in them that might need inflected endings added. I figured out a lot of ways to weed out things that weren't verbs, like looking at words that end in "y" or "s" or whatnot. I've also continued finding word parts that need to be asterisked: bone, stroke, nose, son, late, lock, hand, time, foot, wear, print, note, step, land, head, walk, and hold.
I ran into particularly tedious problems with "out-" and "sub-". The old StenEd "out-" is O*UT, which is my "-out," so I had to move the asterisks in those outlines from the first stroke to the second one. I don't like the idea of "sub" and "sub-" being the same outline, so I had to add an asterisk to all the strokes that come after "sub-" (or at least the ones that are words on their own), like "submarine" and whatnot.
10.23
Looking through every dictionary with B in it is turning out to be more useful than I thought. I'm discovering a lot of potential word boundary conflicts. So far, I've come up with -log, -list, -lift, -top, -mark, -stick, -plate, -rack, -store, -worm, -dock, and -neck. I also had to figure out a way to distinguish between "ball," -bal, and -ball. I was already doing BA*UL for -ball since I discovered a problem with that a long time ago, but I had never actually changed the dictionary entries to reflect it! I wound up doing BAL for "ball" and B*AL for -bal, so the only part I have to try to remember is B*AL.
I still have 35k entries to go through, but at least I feel like I'm doing a little more than just getting in a few inflected endings a day.
10.16
I'm trying out something new with the Report-It: focusing on my wrists. Trying to make them straight instead of tilted down. So far I can either get into a position where my shoulders/arms are comfortable, or I can get into one where I can actually stroke the keys, but not both at the same time. Someday.
I got all of my drill speeds up to 120, and my average drill speed is now 140. I also spent about two and a half hours going through my dictionary and deleting all the briefs for phrases that I didn't even know were in there, because I never learned them. They just came pre-loaded on the StenEd dictionary. I wound up deleting 2400 (or actually, moving them out of my dictionary into their own dictionary, since I'm trying to remember not to actually "delete" anything anymore).
While I was doing that, I discovered some more things that could have been word boundary problems. I found some phrases like "bill folded" that made me wonder if BIL/FOELD was defined as "billfold," and, in fact, it was. I wound up fixing issues with -fold, -rest, -watch, and -end. I also realized I was using the same stroke for fer- and -fer, and in fixing that I also fixed -vent and -tile. I'm trying to remember to asterisk any word ending that's also a word on its own.
My next big project is to go through all the entries in my dictionary that have B and/or P in them and add inflected endings to the verbs. Eclipse 5 has the awsome feature of automatically translating your integral prefixes and stuffixes, which is great except in the case of N. NG and ND cause way too many conflicts, so I don't want them to be automatically translated, which means I can't have BG/BD or PG/PD in the table, either, and I'll have to manually enter all of those.
I've got 45k entries with B in them, and I only knocked out 4500 in my first go at it today, so I'm not going to be moving on anytime soon.
StenEd: Y U No Be Conflict-Free?
I've hit a major roadblock in my speedbuilding, and it's really starting to become aggravating. I haven't made any progress in a whole year. I'm supposed to have been "graduated" by now! Ugh. All I can do is keep plugging away at it, I guess. I don't know what the big problem is with this 2-minute section, though. It's really starting to lose all meaning at this point.
I did finally accomplish something, though: I made it through the list of conflict-finding sentences! At first I was just going through it and if the sentence didn't produce a conflict, I moved on. But sometimes that was just because of a particular brief I had. So I took a closer look at what the sentence was trying to show me (that you shouldn't have the same outline for PER-, -PER and PER, for example) and made sure I wouldn't have any conflicts in any situation, not just the one presented by the sentence.
I discovered a lot of flaws in my own personal theory, and in StenEd, the above example being one of them. At the end of the exercise, I had a problem with: -con, -ran, -less, -fin, -den, -mine, -lean, -net, -lent, -rise, -set, -let, -size, -sit, -stance, -ate, -wait, -pal, -lay, -nut, -plain, -lies, -man, -jer, -win, est-, -til, -mit, Ron-, and -ster. A lot of them are easy fixes, like adding an asterisk to the word part and leaving the actual words as they are, and I didn't have to change a huge amount of entries. However, there were some word parts that took more work. They were, with number of entries I had to fix: -tic/tic/tick (200), -cal/cal/-cal (345), ter/-ter (277), -rate (113), -ton (115), and -ship (92).
Tick/tic/-tic was particularly problematic. TIK for tick, obviously, and T*IK for tic, but I couldn't do T-K for -tic because that's my "it can." So I went with T*K. The real problem is going to be remembering my resolutions for all of this stuff. Why couldn't StenEd have just actually been a conflict-free realtime theory, instead of being one "most of the time"?
With all the stuff I had to fix, I was beginning to think I should've just left the asterisks in all of my ending word parts, because now I have to try to remember which ones have asterisks and which ones don't. I tried to delete the vowels or do something other than just add an asterisk to make it easier to remember. Hopefully the number of ones I wound up just doing asterisks for is going to be small enough that I can learn them without inducing massive amounts of hesitation.
I also spent about half an hour going through all of my capitalized entries and forcing literal case on names like "De Niro." I already had most of them done, but I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed any and it would all be consistent.
9.18
I finally finished the VITAC book..sort of, anyway. I still have a few things in my dictionary I need to clean up, but I decided they weren't the most important things to get done right now. It only took me about 11 hours, which isn't bad at all, except for the fact that it took me about 3 months to get through those 11 hours of work.
I got up to acceptable accuracy on that ridiculously difficult minute a week ago, and I'm still working on the first two minutes of that piece together. I hit 324 today, which was pretty exciting. I'm feeling even better about the Report-It, quite possibly the best I've ever felt, in fact. I got there by consciously forcing myself to get into proper position every time I started to write. Now though, I'm starting to wonder if I'm just going for what feels right/easiest and letting my shoulders tense up, so I think I need to examine that next time I write.
I've gotten all of my drills up to 110 or better, and my average speed on them is now 134 wpm. In dictionary maintenance, I decided all words like "forum" should be written with *UM to avoid conflicting with the word "um," so I changed all 133 instances of that. I'm not so sure about it now since it contradicts my plan to add asterisks to words and keep them out of final word parts, but it always seemed wrong to me to use UM, so I guess I'll just give it a try.
The next thing on my to-do list is to go through the NJCaptions conflict-finding sentences. I started doing it before I got the VITAC book, and now I want to start again from the beginning. I made it all the way through the first page in one sitting. I discovered that in StenEd, TOR- and -TOR are both TOR, which doesn't work at all, so today I spent half an hour going through all 700 -TOR entries and changing them to TO*R. I only had 53 TOR- entries, but I'm trying to write all of my initial word parts without asterisks, since that's how I learned most of them.
9.6
Not much to report today, at least in terms of improvement. I feel like I might finally be getting somewhere with the Report-It, but I'm not there yet. The minute I'm working on is so ridiculously difficult. I can't believe it's only at 230 wpm. I routinely write it at 214 or 250, and I regularly hit 300 at the end, too. I've never had 300 come up with any sort of regularity before, so I must be doing something right.
A couple times, I've managed to write "poultry was raping-free." I guess I should take raping out of the dictionary; no one wants to see that come up the next time someone says "range." I'm about to spend a week training myself to use the STK- for Z rather than S*, and I've apparently written the word "zoom" 508 times.
8.21
I finally got to the point where I can do all of the single-stroke drills at at least 100 wpm! And it only took me 9 weeks. Okay, so that's kind of sad. My average on the drills is now 130. It was 115 when I started, so I guess that's good.
I also got my new minute today. It took me almost two weeks, but it was at 250. I got up to 260 at the end of it once. My next minute is at 230, but it doesn't seem any slower.
I also got my new minute today. It took me almost two weeks, but it was at 250. I got up to 260 at the end of it once. My next minute is at 230, but it doesn't seem any slower.
8.12
Apparently at some point, I decided it was okay to define some "–ness" words using –NS rather than *NS. I realized that the other day, and I decided to go back and fix all of those entries. It turns out I had 1,600 "–ness" entries, and about a third of them didn’t have asterisks, so yesterday I spent 45 minutes going through and fixing that. I also looked at the next section of the VITAC book, which just happened to be alphabets.
I was just thinking that I needed to really get in there and fix my alphabets, so, then of course I had to. I spent about an hour evaluating which ones I needed and how I was going to define them. I wound up with five. The first two I already used and didn’t change. An uppercase and a lowercase way to type the letters in my global window (or anywhere I happen to be, theoretically, but the global window is the only place I use it). Those are A*RBGS and A-PG, respectively.
I also needed one for capital letters with periods, so that was easy, A*FPLT. Then I did one for standalone capital letters, A*, and one to just attach a lowercase letter to the last word, A*PG. I decided that I’ll use a separate stroke to go back and stitch a word, make it lowercase, or start it with a capital letter. I haven’t figured out how I’m going to do that yet, though.
8.11
I finished my whole entire piece on Tuesday. It only took five weeks, which is good, and much better than the 14 weeks I spent on the one before it. Unfortunately, it was the last one that RTC labeled as 220 wpm, so now I have to move up to 225. That wouldn’t be so bad except that the first piece at "225" is actually 250 wpm for the first minute. :(
I’ve been working on it for a couple of days, and I’m not ready to give up yet, but it’s definitely difficult. I actually hit 214 at the end of it today. I misstroked "windowsills," and what I actually wrote was "vindowsills." TM translated it to "veindo Simms."
8.8
Lots of things have happened since I updated last. I got a new job, which I like lot better, and that kind of takes the pressure off of getting done with "school" as soon as possible. My boyfriend of six years broke up with me a week ago, but I didn’t take a single second off from homework. I think it actually helped me focus a little bit. I also didn’t care about much of anything for a few days, so I wasn’t stressed out about trying to get everything perfect when I was writing.
I got the 2 minutes together that I was working on last Saturday, at 97.8% accuracy, and 250 wpm at the end. I was also going at 250 wpm when I got the next minute last Wednesday (I just barely got it – 95.01% accuracy). That one only went so quickly because it was at about 210 wpm, though. Now all I have left to finish the piece is the last 2 minutes together!
Unfortunately, because of scheduling with my new job, I had to take 2 days off in a row. I used to take a day off once a week, and I haven’t been doing that for about seven months. Now I get to go back to it, which is great, but this particular set of weeks, the days had to be next to each other, and that didn’t help at all.
I feel like I spend 95% of my practice time writing in a position where I can’t properly reach the keys, and then, that one magical moment when I manage to get in the right position is when I get my minutes. I guess I’ll figure it out eventually. I discovered that slog, spake, and slub weren’t in my dictionary. I also got "boric flay" out of trying to write "work and play," which was interesting.
7.24
I made it through three sections of the VITAC book in one day. One was about homephones, which I pretty much had worked out already from StenEd. The next was prefixes and suffixes, and luckily there aren’t that many in the VITAC book. I did skip a few, and there are a few I still need to learn. I spent most of the time in that section on the "medical and technical" ones. The last section was 25 pages of words that might create conflicts. Going through that wasn’t any fun at all.
I think I might have found a good position for the BackJoy and the Report-It and everything. It’s not perfect, so I’m still tweaking it, but maybe someday soon I won’t feel like I’m fighting to hit the right keys anymore. I got my last minute on Wednesday, and I got that one and the one before it together yesterday at 96.5% accuracy. The new minute doesn’t seem too hard, and it’s at 230 wpm.
7.17
I started going through my dictionary and trying to change all the initial "z"s from S* to STK. The VITAC book says I should, and I’ve had some problems with the S*, so I decided I might as well. As I was painstakingly updating 200 entries, I started to wonder how much I really needed words like "marbelization" in my dictionary. I got through all of those, and then I decided to just look at all instances of "z" so I could catch everything that I needed to change, and I decided I should probably wait and make sure that change is going to "stick" before I spend all that time changing my dictionary.
When I first started incorporating StenoMaster, I loved the idea of doing "–ss" as -S and "sses"/"ces" as -SZ. But I eventually realized that my fingers aren't that accurate, and I have trouble writing SZ quickly, so I should probably just save that for special things I already learned it for, like "less" vs. "–less" and "miss" vs. "mis-". I just now went through and deleted all 194 entries that needed to be changed back.
I decided a while ago that SWR- was a cool way to write "shr-" instead of SH/R, but of course I never did anything about it, so when that came up in the VITAC book, I went through and fixed all 94 entries of that. The StenEd dictionary came with all of those words defined twice with the same outline, one with an asterisk and one without. I have no idea why.
I also decided to adopt the method of distinguishing between words like "cash" and "carb" by writing "carb" as CAURB a while ago. Luckily there aren’t many words like that and I had fixed most of them already, but I went through and double-checked that list, too.
The VITAC book doesn’t like the idea of writing words like "bask" in two strokes, which StenoMaster taught me to stop doing anyway, but I went through and made sure that all 74 words like that were now correct in my dictionary. Most of them were, thanks to having come up in the "–sk" exercise in the Phoenix drill book.
The VITAC book also introduced me to the idea of writing words like "drank" as DRAFRNG. I’d probably noticed that on depoman before, but it just seemed weird. I write it now as DRA*NG, but when I saw it in the book, I tried it out, and I realized it’s the same thing, you just don’t have to move your index finger over as far. I guess it’s a better idea, because I always had a hard time with "-nk" words, anyway. I decided not to change those entries yet though, since it’s another one that’s going to be a big project
The book also says you should distinguish between "comp" and "ex", because StenEd says to use KP for both, which does create some conflicts. I think I’ve got that mostly under control though, since I learned which ones to watch out for in theory class, so I’m just going to leave it. The book says to use –GT for –TH so you can have *T open for proper nouns, but -GT would really mess up my words like "netting", so I’m not doing that, either.
It says to use –FT for –ST for the same reason, but I think that would be too much of a change for me to worry about right now when it hasn’t been a problem yet anyway. It also says to do –FRB for –V, but that’s really hard for me to stroke, so I’m not doing that, either. And of course, the biggest suggestion I’m ignoring is to not incorporate any endings. I don’t see any reason to give that up.
So I sort of finished another section of the book, by just about skipping half of the ideas and saving the other half for later. I also discovered that "snooze" wasn’t in my dictionary.
I got this BackJoy thing, and I kind of like it, and I think I’m going to keep it, but it changes my posture, so now I have to figure out all over again where to put the Report-It, and I’m not having much success yet, which means I’m not making much progress on this minute, which is also super fast. I did get up to 250 wpm at the end of it today, though.
7.13
I got my two minutes together yesterday at 98% accuracy. My new minute seems hard. It’s at about 234 wpm. At least if I ever run into a dictation that’s actually at 220 like it’s labeled, I’ll be ready. I decided to create a job dictionary for the drill book. I ran into one drill in particular that was full of words that aren’t actual words, like "tinct" and "junct" and "funct." I didn’t like how they never translated, but I didn’t want them in my dictionary, either.
I also had time to go through and delete all 500 entries I had where -TD was defined as -ted. That must be acceptable somehow in StenEd, because I don’t think I added that many myself. I hit the "D" too often when I'm only going for the "T," though, and I also had problems only hitting one or the other when I was trying to stroke both.
7.10
I got my new minute already! Two days, not bad. While writing it, I accidentally wrote "poifriend." "Poifriend" not being a word, I think I'll be safe enough defining that as boyfriend.
7.09
Erik on depoman was talking about "quality" practice the other day, and he brought up a good point about being interested in your homework. He said that as soon as you lose interest, you might as well not be practicing, because you're not learning anything anymore. This week I've been focusing on focusing (har) and trying to make sure I don't ever go on "autopilot" when I'm doing any part of my practice.
It seems to be paying off, because I already got the minute at 235 wpm. I got it yesterday at 95.9% accuracy, and I was going at 260 wpm at the end. My new minute is only at 208 wpm, but it has a lot of ages and numbers which are making it hard. I’ve already gotten up to 231 on it, though. Thanks to the drill book, I also discovered that "smirk" wasn’t in my dictionary.
Task List: July
- Delete all entries that include -TD for words like "edited"
- Do 8 sections of the VITAC book
- Re-do the NJCaptions list of prefixes and suffixes
- Write through the conflict-finding sentences on the Phoenix site
- Delete unused briefs from my dictionary
- Global words/note errors in broadcast transcripts
7.02
I finally finished my piece! I have been working on it for almost 14 weeks. That seems a little excessive. I got it at over 300 wpm and 96% accuracy. I start my speedbuilding every day by writing difficult words from the piece five times each. I don't take those words off the list until I finish the piece. I wound up with 53 words for this piece, and I decided I can write all but 16 of them well enough now. I’ve really been looking forward to not having to write all of those anymore.
You may remember that I came up with a great brief for "breast cancer" earlier in the piece. It turned out it wasn't so easy to stroke, but the misstrokes didn't conflict with anything, so I didn't worry about it. I now have 38 entries for it, and I wrote it the right way over 5,100 times. I wound up with a final total of 35 entries for mammogram, but I only wrote that 1,300 times.
You may remember that I came up with a great brief for "breast cancer" earlier in the piece. It turned out it wasn't so easy to stroke, but the misstrokes didn't conflict with anything, so I didn't worry about it. I now have 38 entries for it, and I wrote it the right way over 5,100 times. I wound up with a final total of 35 entries for mammogram, but I only wrote that 1,300 times.
My new piece seems like it’s going to be really hard, or at least the first minute is. There are a lot of names. It’s also at 235 wpm. I slowed it down to the next highest speed, and it was 211 wpm. I don’t want to drop down that low, so I guess I’m just stuck with 235. Today was my first day with it and I got up to 173 wpm. I had to slow it down to 140 in order to write it perfectly, though.
I figured out which drill I missed in the book. I only had a few drills left to check after that one, so I just went ahead and finished them, and tomorrow I go back to the ones I was really bad at. I’ve been working on a new strategy with the book, which is to kind of read ahead and get ready for the words that are coming up instead of just letting them be a surprise. It seems to be working well.
6.29
I almost got the last 2 minutes of my piece today. I got them at 94.3% accuracy. So close. Thanks to the Phoenix drill book, I have Norge in my dictionary if it ever comes up. Also, despite what Carol says, I’ve decided that it’s okay to tuck the "G" on words that end in "R." The only example she gives of why it’s not okay is burg/burring, and really, I don’t think burring is going to come up enough for it to be a problem. I couldn't think of anything else where it has been or would be a problem, either, so I’m just going to go ahead and do it. I already deleted anything I had like that, though.
6.25
I got up to 300 wpm on my minute yesterday. I had no idea I was going that fast, though. It felt exactly the same as when I was only going at 175 wpm. Today I got up to 300 twice, and one of those times was when I wrote the entire minute, at 95% accuracy! It took me exactly one week to get it, which is about how long it’s supposed to take me to get a new minute at practice speed. The minute had 223 words, too, so it’s not like it was a slow part of the piece or anything.
I decided that now was the best time to go back and figure out which drill I missed. For some reason I thought I couldn’t do the KN- drill, so I knew which one that was, and I noticed I was on the wrong number about 19 drills later, so that’s only 20 drills I have to do over again. I’ve done eight so far, and I’ve improved on all of them, although not enough to help my average. After a week of re-doing drills, I’ve only gone from 115 to 116.
6.22
I got up to 250 on the new minute a few times today. With my current setup, I don't have anything under the LS - no case, no paper, nothing. I hope it stays that way when I get something permanent down. I felt like it was worth noting that when I do the Phoenix drills, anything I misstroke for the first time counts as a mistake, and I don't get to move on to the next speed. If it's already in my dictionary because I misstroked it last time, I don't count it as a misstroke. I decided today that if Translation Magic translates it properly even though it's a first-time misstroke, I'm not going to count that as a misstroke, either.
I moved up to 60 wpm on SKW (from 45), and 70 WPM on SHR (from 50), which I was happy with. I was not happy that it took me over half an hour to do it, but I'm committing to doing two drills every day. After I made it through all 107 drills (actually, I somehow missed a couple somewhere before #66, and I have no idea which ones, so I need to figure that out someday), my average speed was exactly 115 wpm. It was down to 110 before I got to the "strength-building drills," so I was happy enough to see it go back up to 115. Now after re-doing 3 drills, it's up to 116. Not exactly impressive, but I'll get there.
6.21
My new minute seems easy, but they always do. I got up to 214 at the end already, though. I wound up having to go down a speed on both of my drills today. One of them was SHR. StenEd says to do, for example, SH/RED for such things, but I picked up the idea of SWR from depoman. Of course, then I never actually learned it, so in order to write all five columns perfectly today, I had to drop down to 50 wpm. It felt good to get them at any speed, though.
I more or less learned to do consonant + OE for suffixes, and consonant + O for prefixes. So "audio" would be AUD/YOE, and "audiophile" would be AUD/YO/FAOIL. Today I went through about 70 OE entries I had added asterisks to and got rid of the asterisks. The VITAC book suggests using STK for Z instead of S*, which I think is a great idea since I actually have had a few conflicts come up, with "s" words that I wanted to capitalize with an asterisk but couldn’t because that made a "z" word, and whatnot. As I was going through my O*E words, I changed a few "z" words, too. Then I changed all my "-zy" words to STKEU, and then I went ahead and just changed all the "z" words in the entire dictionary, which was only about 150.
I don’t have the foggiest idea what "katzenjammer" means, but apparently I’ve got two ways to write it if it ever comes up.
6.20
I’ve made things difficult for myself with the Report-It again. I realized that in the new position, I was focusing on keeping my shoulders down so I wouldn’t have tension in them. But that was a kind of tension, too, and I wasn’t completely relaxed in that position, either. So I needed to find a place to put the Report-It where my shoulders would be completely relaxed, and now that’s been driving me crazy again.
You know how sometimes, your machine just isn’t quite in the right spot, and you have to slightly adjust your own positioning to account for it, and really fight to get down every word, because you can’t stop to move the machine? I’ve been writing every word like that for the past month. It’s going to be good when I get it right though, I know it is.
I finally got something right today. It was a horrible day for practice. I spent the first 2 hours messing with the Report-It. I didn’t record how long I spent on the drill book, but it was a long time. I finally made it all the way through yesterday, and I also went back and re-did an exercise for the first time. Each day I’m going to do the two that I have the slowest currently recorded speeds for. My worst speed, which was only on one exercise thankfully (the FR one), was 50 wpm.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t best that speed yesterday. But today, I doubled it! I got the words at 100 wpm. I decided that if I have a misstroke already defined in my dictionary, and I write the word that way, it counts as being correct. It doesn’t matter if I’m training myself to write it incorrectly as long as it translates and doesn’t conflict with anything. That took a long time though, writing all 65 words enough times to double the speed, and then I had to do my next-slowest exercise. SKW, 55 wpm. I couldn’t even do it at 55 though. I had to drop it down to 50.
It was well past my normal homework time by the time I started speedbuilding in earnest (8 hours past, in fact) and I wasn’t expecting much out of it since I never really got the Report-It where I wanted it. But then, I wrote my piece (or at least the last two minutes, which is all I’m counting for accuracy) all the way through, and it was at 95% accuracy! After writing the same 4 minutes over and over for the past month, I finally get to move on to..the last minute on this piece!
I know what you’re thinking: if you could write 2 minutes individually at 95% accuracy, and it took you a month to be able to write them together at 95% (with 2 minutes in front of them), maybe that speed is too high. But I maintain that it would’ve happened a lot faster if I hadn’t been struggling with the Report-It the entire time.
StenEd teaches that "any" is NI and "-ny" is N*I. That’s a little weird, though. None of the other –y suffixes have asterisks, so why not just make "any" N*I or something? I was just going to leave it, even though the VITAC book says “-ny” should be NI, but I decided I’d rather go for consistency, so I changed all 176 dictionary entries that had the N*I. Now I have to learn to write "any" as NE. That’s what the book suggested, and I liked the idea of leaving N*I open for other things. I also found a few dozen entries that started with "OR," which I can’t have because that’s my stroke for the word "or," so I fixed those.
6.15
I am starting to show some progress on my piece again, although I don’t really feel any better about it. I'm consistently getting to 250 wpm at the end, and I have even hit six strokes per minute a couple of times. Both times were when I was trying very hard to go as slowly and write as cleanly as possible. It’s so weird how I always wind up going fastest when I’m trying to write the slowest, and I write the slowest when I’m trying to go faster.
I had time for about two more hours of dictionary maintenance today. I started by going back to the suffixes. The general consensus on depoman was that I should have as many prefixes and suffixes as I could use, but I decided that I hadn’t done all of that work in vain. I finished weeding out all the suffixes that needed to keep their asterisks, like the ones that are just words like "woods," and also ones that included –th and –v. I put all of those back in my dictionary. Then I deleted all of the suffixes that started with DL- that I made when I went through the NJCaptions list.
Then, I went through all 780 suffixes that were left and took the asterisks out of them. Then I had about 800 suffixes that needed to be reintroduced into my dictionary, now sans asterisks. As I put them back in, if there were any conflicts I mostly just didn’t enter the suffix. I know a lot of them came from Mark’s dictionary, and those aren’t exactly vital for me to have.
My plan now is that after I go through the VITAC book, I’ll go back through the NJCaptions list again and make suffixes and prefixes again, because I’ll probably want to make them differently than the first time around. After I’ve done that I’ll have to go through the big list of conflict-finding sentences on the Phoenix site.
My plan now is that after I go through the VITAC book, I’ll go back through the NJCaptions list again and make suffixes and prefixes again, because I’ll probably want to make them differently than the first time around. After I’ve done that I’ll have to go through the big list of conflict-finding sentences on the Phoenix site.
After that I went through my dictionary and found all of the words that start with RI or TI or anything like that and either changed them or got rid of them. The one problem I didn’t fix was that fact that StenEd teaches that DI should be used for di- and –dy, which doesn’t seem like a good idea. But I’m not going to worry about that for now.
Then I discovered that I don’t have to worry about the next four concepts in the VITAC book, because they’re already accounted for in my theory. The last concept halfway was. Since I use EN to start words, I’m not supposed to use it in the middle of words, but I do, so I had to go through about 250 entries that were in my dictionary and either delete them because I wouldn’t write them that way anyway, or change the EN to just N.
The next thing I had to fix was the fact that I both started and ended words with EL, so I had to fix/delete 113 entries for that. I didn't have to worry about the next concept, but the last one in the "word boundary errors" section is a doozy. The book says to use ER for -er and -or, and to that end, gives you a list of 268 -or words that you should make sure translate properly in your dictionary. Based on how I break up words, it turns out most of these would involve a tucked R - activator, for example, is just ACT/VAIRT.
Now that I think about it, actually, I'll probably just come back to the list another time. I want to go through the book and figure out what things I need to change in my writing before I go back to just dictionary-building. So that's the first section of the book "done." It took me 6 hours, and I still have 8 sections left.
The next thing I had to fix was the fact that I both started and ended words with EL, so I had to fix/delete 113 entries for that. I didn't have to worry about the next concept, but the last one in the "word boundary errors" section is a doozy. The book says to use ER for -er and -or, and to that end, gives you a list of 268 -or words that you should make sure translate properly in your dictionary. Based on how I break up words, it turns out most of these would involve a tucked R - activator, for example, is just ACT/VAIRT.
Now that I think about it, actually, I'll probably just come back to the list another time. I want to go through the book and figure out what things I need to change in my writing before I go back to just dictionary-building. So that's the first section of the book "done." It took me 6 hours, and I still have 8 sections left.
6.13
I am getting really good at fingerspelling "mastectomy." I’ve got it defined 16 different ways in my dictionary. I’ve done about 4 hours of dictionary maintenance today. First I went through and fixed all the "-y" suffixes that had asterisks in them, like –ty, -ly, etc. That was 2500 entries. There were another 1200 I didn’t have to fix because I never got around to adding the asterisks to them in the first place. That took up most of the time. I was going to delete all the asterisks I added, but I couldn’t figure out a way to find them for anything else, so I guess I’ll just have to do those as I find them.
Then I decided I ought to get the rest of my prefixes and suffixes in order before I went through more of the book. According to the book, you’re only supposed to have "true" prefixes and suffixes defined as such, that is, ones that attach to root words that can stand alone. Using the example from the book, stuff like "URE" isn’t supposed to get defined as a suffix because it's really just a word part and it might mess up other stuff.
I decided I should delete all those extra prefixes and suffixes I have in there. I spent about an hour and a half going through the suffixes. I decided to keep all the ones that are words, like "field" and "land" and whatnot, because that's how I make compound words, by adding asterisks to them, and I’m going to keep doing that. That’s how I’ve always done it.
I decided I should delete all those extra prefixes and suffixes I have in there. I spent about an hour and a half going through the suffixes. I decided to keep all the ones that are words, like "field" and "land" and whatnot, because that's how I make compound words, by adding asterisks to them, and I’m going to keep doing that. That’s how I’ve always done it.
I also decided to keep my special alphabets. I have a different way to write –by, -bi, -bee, -be, -bey, etc. for all the consonants. That'll help with proper names and whatnot. So, after I got through about 1300 of the suffixes, it occurred to me that I really do use a lot of those "word parts," and I think real captioners do, too, so despite what the VITAC book says, I might want to leave them in. And I might have just wasted all of that time.
Ever since one of my theory classes, I’ve had a table of 50 briefs I want to learn that I practice every day, either to memorize them (which usually doesn’t take long) or to get the fingering down. For a while now, I haven’t been adding any new ones to the list because I wanted to incorporate the ways I’ve been changing my writing into the table so I could start actually learning them.
I guess it’s a good thing I never got around to it, since I decided to unlearn that stuff anyaway. Today I finally added a couple of of the "-y" suffixes to it: ten words each from –dy and –ry. Then I remembered that I wanted to put the Phoenix-inspired changes I made to integrated endings in there first, so I had to figure out what to put in. I wound up doing ten words each that end with –ling and –ned, since I have to remember to stroke the endings on those separately now.
Ever since one of my theory classes, I’ve had a table of 50 briefs I want to learn that I practice every day, either to memorize them (which usually doesn’t take long) or to get the fingering down. For a while now, I haven’t been adding any new ones to the list because I wanted to incorporate the ways I’ve been changing my writing into the table so I could start actually learning them.
I guess it’s a good thing I never got around to it, since I decided to unlearn that stuff anyaway. Today I finally added a couple of of the "-y" suffixes to it: ten words each from –dy and –ry. Then I remembered that I wanted to put the Phoenix-inspired changes I made to integrated endings in there first, so I had to figure out what to put in. I wound up doing ten words each that end with –ling and –ned, since I have to remember to stroke the endings on those separately now.
Operation Delete All Asterisks
I also had time to actually start on the VITAC book. The very first thing it talks about is distinguishing starting, middle, and ending sounds. For example, with the long E, it says you should do RE to start, no matter what the spelling is, RAOE in the middle, and RI at the end. That’s actually what I already did when I learned StenEd, but then I added an asterisk to RI, because I thought it would conflict with things like ridiculous, which I wrote with RI.
I did a horrible job recording what I changed, with StenoMaster and my asterisks and suffixes and everything, so I decided that with the VITAC book, I was going to make a list of everything I changed and actually practice and learn all of it. I realized, though, that I never fully, 100% committed to and learned the asterisk in all of the -y endings -- -ty, -ry, -ly, etc. So I had to put them on the list of things I needed to practice and learn.
And then I thought, since I never really learned this asterisk business in the first place, and since the VITAC book is going to have a different solution for any possible conflict I would have had that I was trying to avoid by using the asterisks…why keep trying to learn the asterisks? Why not just go back to writing everything the StenEd way, and only make changes from the VITAC book?
It was an incredibly freeing thought. I haven’t made any progress at all in my writing for the past ten months because in September, I started with the StenoMaster, and in January I gave up on that and started with the asterisks, and somewhere in there I added all of these suffixes. I literally have 2000 suffixes and 500 prefixes. All of that pretty much destroyed my writing altogether.
Of course, now it’s going to be hard to unlearn what I have trained myself to do with the asterisks, but I think it will be for the best. There are a few suffixes I’m going to have to remember to do with asterisks. I looked through the entire VITAC book last night to see just how many there were. It only took about half an hour, and I discovered that there aren’t many.
I think giving up on these asterisks, and all the extra prefixes and suffixes that I never learned anyway, is the most exciting thing in steno since I learned about StenoMaster, which I was quite excited about. The VITAC book actually does suggest one StenoMaster principle, which is using F instead of S/K, so BAFK instead of BAS/K. That's still a hard one for me, but I've never stopped trying to use it.
Unfortunately, now I have to go through my dictionary and delete all the things I put in with asterisks, which is going to be quite a project indeed.
6.10
It’s really nice not to have to spend half of my practice time playing with the Report-It. In all of the terrible positions I had it in, I couldn’t even write for 4 minutes without feeling horribly fatigued, and now at least from a fatigue standpoint, I’m completely back to normal. I haven’t gotten used to the position yet, but I’m working on it.
Today I measured the speed of my piece when I write it for control, at the end of my practice session. I’m almost completely comfortable writing it at that speed, and I don’t think I would want to go much faster. It turns out that it’s only 180 wpm. That seems awfully disappointing. I was also able to figure out how many words were in the 4 minutes that I write at the normal speed. I know it starts out at 230 and finishes at 215. According to RTC, it’s supposed to be 220, and actually, if you average all 4 minutes, it is 222.
The other day I had time for some dictionary maintenance, so I finished fixing every thing I wanted to in terms of integrated endings. I deleted 333 LG words, 122 NG words, and 46 RG words. I also fixed anything where I had BG as in ribbing, because that conflicts with things like Rick, and anything were I had RBG, for things like crashing, because that conflicts with things like cracker. Remembering not to write all of those is going to be a different story.
I deleted some entries with the long A sound and D, like swayed, which interferes with suede. Carol says you shouldn’t attach D to any vowel sounds, but I think I’ve accounted for any problems aside from the long A. I also finally added my attaching alphabet, that attaches lowercase letters to the last word.
6.8
I have not given up on the Report-It. I spent a couple of days not using it, just because it was driving me crazy and I felt like I had to get some actual practice in. I still felt like I could benefit from it after that, though, so I had a friend walk me through the process outlined in the manual and make sure I was doing everything at the proper angles. I tried to use it that way, I really did, but it just wasn’t comfortable. Then I realized that I always write with my shoulders rasied up. So, I tried really hard to force them down and hold them there and put the Report-It in a position that would be comfortable like that. It’s only one spacer lower than where it was before, actually. I haven’t gotten the kinks worked out of that yet, either, but for the first time my right arm doesn’t hurt.
My right arm was always the one that hurt no matter what, and now my left arm hurts instead. I ordered some leather key tabs from Depobook on April 24th, and for various reasons, they didn’t arrive until yesterday. I put some on the right lower bank to test it out, and I realized I was going to have to put them on the upper bank, too. They’re pretty cool. At first I thought they felt weird, but then today I did all of my practice with them on, just on the right side, and I could really tell a difference. The keys on the left all of a sudden felt very hard and painful, and the key tabs were nice and soft. It seems to help with knowing where the keys are, too.
For some reason I don’t feel like I have to press as hard on those keys. I guess because as soon as I feel the tabs, I know I’ve touched key and it’s going to register. I also noticed that if I put the tab a little bit beyond where the key actually is, the space between the banks doesn’t bother me as much. For some reason, ever since I got the LS, it seemed like the spaces between the banks were too big and it bothered me, even though I think they’re supposed to be exactly the same as on any other machine. If I hang the tab a little bit over into that space, it still registers as pressing both keys, which is awesome. I have to experiment with how much space I want to have there now. I just put tabs on the left side, and I didn’t leave any space at all. I figured I know by now where the keys are so that shouldn’t bother me, but I think I am getting some instances of both keys registering when I only meant to stroke one.
For some reason I don’t feel like I have to press as hard on those keys. I guess because as soon as I feel the tabs, I know I’ve touched key and it’s going to register. I also noticed that if I put the tab a little bit beyond where the key actually is, the space between the banks doesn’t bother me as much. For some reason, ever since I got the LS, it seemed like the spaces between the banks were too big and it bothered me, even though I think they’re supposed to be exactly the same as on any other machine. If I hang the tab a little bit over into that space, it still registers as pressing both keys, which is awesome. I have to experiment with how much space I want to have there now. I just put tabs on the left side, and I didn’t leave any space at all. I figured I know by now where the keys are so that shouldn’t bother me, but I think I am getting some instances of both keys registering when I only meant to stroke one.
The great thing about these tabs is that they're so easy to remove that you don’t have to do anything besides just pull them right off, and then you can re-attach them. That's one of the reasons I got this kind of key tab, although I didn’t know they would be that easy to take off. I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that I won’t have to adjust the sensitivity of my keys at all. I thought that might be a problem, but as far as I can tell, everything still registers just fine.
Of course, I haven’t made any progress on my piece at all, which is depressing, but I hit 260 at the end of it today, which hasn’t happened in quite a while. I found out the other day that the word "rind" wasn’t in my dictionary, which I thought was weird.
6.1
I am still making adjustments to the placement of the Report-It (closer, farther, straighter, more angled, narrower, wider; the only thing I don’t have to adjust anymore is the height), which means I’m still making adjustments to the position of the machine, and writing feels like an epic struggle. I’m determined to get it to work. Last night I actually had some spare time to do some dictionary maintenance. I went through my dictionary and deleted all of the entries for words that end in R, N, or L that I added an -ed to. There were 144, 136, and 300, respectively.
Horses
I have been trying to use the Report-It. I think it is probably the most frustrating thing I have ever done in my life, even worse than getting used to the LS, which took about three months, and which I had just barely accomplished when I got the Report-It. I really just want to throw it out the window, and then go outside and attack it. I have tried so many positions of the Report-It and the writer and my arms and everything. I can never tell what I need to do to fix it, and I’m using all of my practice time on adjusting it instead of practicing, so I’m losing major time on that front. Every time I leave it in the best position I could figure out, and then the next day I come back to it and it’s totally wrong and I have to start all over again.
Today I had someone help me so I could make sure my elbows were at a right angle, so at least I have that figured out now. I’m not giving up, though. I have to make it work, because now that I’ve been using it, it hurts more not to use it, although I can’t write hardly at all while using it. I have the arm position down I guess, I just need to get the machine in the right spot for where my arms are, but I’m not used to writing like this at all.
I think I’ve officially given up my dream of taking the Caption Masters class in July. I didn’t realize how horrible my writing had become. It’s kind of ironic that if I hadn’t done what the instructor suggested, I would probably be fast enough for the class by now. But since I added the asterisks, I can’t write anything anymore, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to. Originally, I was planning to be done with school by August at the latest. I wonder if I would be fast enough if I hadn’t changed so many things? After I didn’t make it into the Caption Masters class in January, I figured I’d be at 180 for sure in a couple of months, and I’d get into the class for July, and finish it in November, and be ready to work then.
But now that’s not going to happen, so I guess I just don’t have a timeline at all, and the best I can hope for is that it doesn’t take me seven years like it does most people. The average time to become is court reporter is five years, and then people usually spend at least a couple years doing that before they can caption. It’s so hard going through and trying to learn to do everything perfectly. Sometimes I just wish I could quit and find something to work towards where I could see actual progress, and have a timeline, and know that I was on the right track to getting done by a certain date.
I’ve been trying to sound things out when I fingerspell them, so hopefully that’s a good strategy, because I’m getting better at it. I made it halfway through the drill book, well, more than halfway by now because I’m on exercise 70, but that’s just depressing because all I seem to be doing is discovering all the finger positions I never quite mastered and am going to have problems with.
Square One
I’ve been feeling very frustrated with my writing lately. I feel like I've changed so many things from StenEd. I started with integrating endings, and that opened a whole can of worms and conflicts. Now when I write, I’m always trying to remember to incorporate endings, or remember which ones I can’t do, and especially now that I read about the ones I can’t incorporate on Phoenix, I’m worrying about that, too.
When I got the Magnum Steno book, I decided to put all the prefixes and suffixes in my dictionary, and that caused some conflicts, so I tried to change the way I write some things. I never practiced them, though, so when I tested for Caption Masters, a few things came out wrong, and the instructor suggested that I add asterisks to all of my suffixes. I didn’t really know what was or what should be a suffix though, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to try to figure out "is this actually a suffix, or just a second stroke" when I was writing, so I decided to add asterisks to all of my second strokes, but I didn’t really commit to it, and I just kind of do it when it comes naturally, but it’s still something that slows me down when I write. Even though I should just do an asterisk on all of my second strokes, I always have that moment of hesitation where I wonder, "do I need one here or not?"
Then I bought the Broadcast Captioning Training Manual from NJCaptions, and I decided to add all the prefixes and suffixes that were listed in it to my dictionary, and that caused all kinds of conflicts and problems and things I had to come up with alternate ways of writing in order to fix. I started using DL- at the start of my suffixes, because there were times when the outline for the suffix by itself was a regular word, and I needed to use that same outline as a prefix and a suffix, so I put the asterisk in the prefix, and then I didn’t have any way to distinguish the suffix, so, DL- worked great. But I didn’t want to have to remember which ones needed DL and which ones didn’t, so where possible, I just created all of them with DL-. So that’s another thing I have to think about; remembering the DL, and all the other things like it that I added.
That’s basically the extent of it, but I feel like it’s really hurting my speed. It seems like every time I hear a word, I experience massive hesistation where I have to think, "how am I supposed to write that now?" It’s all for the better because my writing will be truly conflict free, unlike it was with just the StenEd, where, for instance, the outline for the word con, and for words starting with con and for words ending with con were all the same. But I almost feel like I’ve created this mutant theory, and I need to go back to square one and go back through my theory book and start completely over and do it all again, spend six months writing through all the exercises and word lists and train myself to write the way I want to now.
I don’t have time for that kind of thing though, not unless I stop speedbuilding, and I certainly don’t want to do that. I think, though, before I start going through my dictionary wholesale and trying to fix everything to at least translate properly when I remember to write it the way I want to, I’m going to work through the VITAC book, since I’m probably going to change even more things as I do that. It talks about what is and what isn't a suffix, and has ways to fix basically all the conflicts. I wish I had started with it and only changed things based on it to begin with.
In other news, I got my minute today. I don’t feel too much accomplishment about that though, because it was only at 215. That’s the annoying thing about Realtime Coach. Even though it says a piece is at a certain speed, it’s really not. It’s all over the map. It could start faster than it says it is, and then get slower than it says it is, and then be at the right speed for a minute. It’s crazy. I decided to just ignore that and practice the ones that say they’re the speed I want, though.
Report-It Fail
No real progress to report on the speedbuilding, although I was writing at 260 at one point yesterday. My accuracy has also been pretty good so far; I just wish I could write the minute without any drops with that accuracy, and then I’d be set. I realized that I hadn’t finished setting up my capital typing alphabet, so I did that today, and I also edited my integral prefix and suffix table. Trying to incorporate endings in words that end in R, N, or L causes way too many conflicts, so I’ve decided it’s better not to do it at all, and I fixed my table to stop suggesting -ing and -ed for those. I’ll have to go back sometime and delete all the entries I’ve already made that include endings for those, too. I also need to go back and add an alphabet that attaches single letters to the last word.
One thing that’s kind of frustrating about the Phoenix drill book is all the words that are mixed in to help with transitions. I think that’s a great idea, and an important thing to work on, but it seems like those are the words that always throw me off, because they’re words that I have trouble with to begin with. "Merge" and "starve" are in with the words that end in -rt. I don’t really have a problem with -rt, but then I have to record a low speed because something like merge or starve tripped me up. Doing the drills is good for focus, though. It’s so hard to pay attention to them and not let my mind drift, especially to think about how I just got a word, or how I barely just got a word. Of course, that’s the kind of thing you have to be constantly trying not to do in regular writing, too.
I had no idea I would have such a hard time writing mammogram. I have 17 entries for it in my dictionary because I misstroke it so many different ways.
I ordered a Report-It a while ago, and it came today. I just spent about an hour and a half messing with it. I tried the method outlined in the manual first, which is to position yourself properly for posture and align the Report-It and your machine accordingly. That didn't work, so I tried sitting like I usually do and getting the Report-It under my arms, and that didn't feel good, either. I just felt really restricted, and I couldn't get in a spot where my arms were comfortable and I could reach the keys at the same time.
So, now I have the option of either keeping the thing for $160, or sending it back for $40.
I ordered a Report-It a while ago, and it came today. I just spent about an hour and a half messing with it. I tried the method outlined in the manual first, which is to position yourself properly for posture and align the Report-It and your machine accordingly. That didn't work, so I tried sitting like I usually do and getting the Report-It under my arms, and that didn't feel good, either. I just felt really restricted, and I couldn't get in a spot where my arms were comfortable and I could reach the keys at the same time.
So, now I have the option of either keeping the thing for $160, or sending it back for $40.
5.20
I am doing pretty well on my new minute already. I wrote it once at 250 today, and I’m regularly getting to 214. If only the entire piece could be as easy as the last sentence. I came up with a brief for breast cancer: BRA*RNS. At first fingerspelling my dictionary entries was nearly impossible, but it’s getting easier now.
I’m really concerned about fingerspelling in general, though, because although I’m great at spelling and grammar, I’ve always had a hard time spelling things out loud without writing them down and reading out the letters, and fingerspelling is a lot like that. When I started trying to add asterisks to all of my suffixes, I didn’t do "-er" because *ER was a prefix for me. Now, though, I sometimes go to write it, and "-ers," with an asterisk, so maybe I’m starting to absorb that idea more.
5.18
I ordered the VITAC book. I had the bright idea to e-mail VITAC directly and see if they knew where I could get one, and someone e-mailed me back the next day saying I could call and order from them. It’s a good thing I had poked around the VITAC site a bit, because the e-mail simply came from the author of the book and had no subject! I discovered this morning that there are actually still three seats open in the Caption Masters class. I guess the other display was an error. So I might still be able to take that in July, and all the information in the VITAC book might be discussed in the class, but that’s all right. You can never have too many steno books, I guess.
Yesterday I was on depoman searching for posts about something or other, and I came across the suggestion that one should add dictionary entries from the machine to practice fingerspelling. And it’s a useful thing to be able to do, anyway. So I spent a good hour yesterday getting that all set up. I’m still trying to figure out my alphabets, though. I need to have a way to fingerspell in capital and lowercase in realtime and in the global window, so that’s four alphabets. I spent some time on it today and I think I have it worked out.
I got my two minutes together today, and I also managed to stack three words, although not on that final take. "Here and staying" came out as STKPHAOEURG. I got to record a drill exercise at 120, which is better than I’ve done for the past 2 days, but I also had to record one at 50. Apparently, I have a really, really hard time with "fr-" words, which is weird because FR is my brief for from, which I write all the time.
It’s really fun to be able to do things from the machine. After every take, I go back and write any mis-strokes five times, along with the words before and after them. It was always a hassle to take my hands off the machine to scroll down through the take, but now I don’t have to!
5.16
I just finished fixing what was lost between Wednesday and Friday, to the best of my ability, so that's exciting. I guess it's good that that happened so early in the life of this blog, though, because now I know that I need to keep a backup of all of my posts.
I think writing with shorter nails is quieter, as you would expect it to be. It almost seems like my fingers make a squishy sound on the keys now, though. I noticed during my drill practice that I have a real problem writing "-SH" when I mean to write "-CH." I definitely didn't feel like I made any progress on my two minutes together today, but for this last minute, I picked up on something that Gregorio mentioned on depoman. He was talking about how to pass tests, and he said that during practice, you should always make your last take a good one, and write it at a speed you're comfortable with. Of course, I've heard that many times from different sources, including other people on the forum and my professor at STLCC. I never actually did it, though.
People always seemed to say the reason was so that you would leave feeling good about your practice, no matter how poorly you actually did that day, and I always thought I was strong enough that I didn't need that. My professor also put it in terms of "writing for control" after speedbuilding, but I basically write for control the entire time, so I didn't feel like I needed to do that, either. But when Gregorio talked about it in terms of helping pass tests, I decided to give it a try, and I really like it. It's really nice to be able to write the thing that I just spent an hour failing to write, because after failing for a week (or three) straight, I start to feel like it's something that I'll never be able to do, and even though it's at a slower speed, it makes me feel better to be able to write it. I don't think that had anything to do with me getting that last minute so fast (comparatively) either, though.
5.15
I got my minute today! I practiced writing it for about half an hour, and then on the very last runthrough before I was going to take a break, I decided to loosen up a little and not be so strict about accuracy, and I got it at 250 wpm (at the end, anyway) and 96% accuracy! It took me exactly a week, which isn’t bad at all. I think it was easier material than the rest of the piece has been, though.
I realized that I really like writing to a metronome. It’s almost calming, knowing that everything is going to happen at exactly the same speed. I also like how there’s not really any pressure, at least not right now when I’m just seeing what my top speed is on all the exercises. Yesterday my average speed actually went up from 125 to 129, but today it went back down to 127. I had to record something at 75 wpm, which is insanely slow. It had to do with PL-, which I’m apparently very bad at. “Fruit” was thrown in, too, though, and I guess all of those PL- words with an FR- word in the middle really threw me off. I think I have problems with F- in general.
The Phoenix book talks about how important keyboard position is, so you’re able to reach all the keys easily. I decided to try lowering my machine a bit. I use the plastic case it came in as a lap desk, so to lower it, I opened the case and started writing on just the thicker half. It looks weird and I don’t know if I could do it if I had a desk in front of my legs, but it seems to feel a lot better. I should probably buy a real lap desk, but I like the idea of not having to bring it with me or spend money on it.
I think the new position has helped, though, because ever since I got the LS, I’ve had to actually put my fingers on the home row to figure out where the machine is every time I take my hands off it, which I never had to do with the SRT. I had to define 150 null strokes because I would of course never hit the home row, but it would still help me know where I was. I created my last one on the 6th. I can’t really be sure if I’m using the null strokes less, but it seems like I am.
I don’t know if it was inspired by the Phoenix book or not, but I also decided to file my nails extremely short. I always kept them short to help me write, but I was never truly writing with my fingertips like you’re supposed to. I filed them down yesterday after my practice, as low as I could go without hurting myself. They look really pathetic now and it’s actually rather depressing. I like writing with them short, though. It feels like being barefoot. I can feel the keys a lot better. I’d like to say that’s why I got my minute today, but I don’t think that was it. I’ve been feeling more confident about it for the past couple of days, and I think I was successful in focusing on being slow and accurate with this minute.
I started incorporating endings into my root words about nine months ago. I went crazy with it and added everything you could. It turns out that it wasn’t quicker for me to write that way, at least not right now, so I’ve backed off of some of it. I added -L as an option for –l and –ly, but it created this problem where it would suggest it for both things on the same word, and I just now got around to taking it out of the integral prefixes and suffixes option. I went ahead and added it as an option with an asterisk, although sometimes I do write it without one, like SLOEL for slowly. I always get things like that popping up as suggestions, and I’ve started declining them when I think I won’t use them, to leave them open for Translation Magic to do something else with. I wonder if I should just take them out of the table altogether?
I found out yesterday that all the spots for the Caption Masters program in July are full. I was going to re-test at some point before July, and I checked the status every day, and it magically went from three seats open to none, so I guess they weren’t updating it, because I doubt all three filled up in the same day. That kind of pulled the rug out from under me, but maybe I can change the way I practice on my own. I want to get a copy of the VITAC book because it deals with how to change your writing and your dictionary to get ready for realtime, and that’s definitely something I’ve been trying to work on (and struggling with) recently. The only problem is you can’t buy the book anywhere!
5.13
I am slowly making progress on my minute. I can only tell how fast I’m going at the very end, but I was writing at 250 wpm once yesterday and once today. I’m also sporadically getting to about 214 at the end now. I finally decided to give up my brief for driver. I’ve never really been able to write it well, and so now I’m just going to write DRAOIV/ER. I think instead of dictionary maintenance, I’m going to finish getting through all 107 exercises in the Phoenix drill book. So far I’ve made it through 30, and my speed is slowly falling, unfortunately. It’s down to 126 now. Last time I did any work with a metronome, my average speed was 104, but that had some multisyllabic words, so I guess I can’t really make a comparison.
The biggest problem I’m having with the exercises in the drill book, besides not being able to go fast enough, is coming to a dead stop whenever I make a mistake. You’re supposed to just keep going without erasing in order to keep a steady rhythm. I’m working on the same thing during speedbuilding, too. I might as well be stopping every time I feel myself make a mistake, because I have to write the word again once, twice, or even three times before I can keep writing, and by then I’ve missed quite a bit of audio. I’d be much better off if I could just ignore it and keep going. My accuracy wouldn’t suffer that much, either. The problem I’ve had with trying to do that in the past is then I can’t focus on writing anything well and I just write slop. I need to find a happy medium, where I try to write everything perfectly, but if I don’t, I just ignore it and keep going.
I did get another cool thing from the Phoenix book. They say to check your machine position, you should write “green glass, black and blue.” I like that. It works well for reassuring me that my machine is in the right place. I have a terrible time with positioning, and it hasn’t gotten any better on the LS. I always feel like I have to “search” for the keys, or like they’re not where I expect them to be. I like to really press the keys and linger on them every time I hit to get a feeling for where I am, which is the totally wrong thing to do, but I’ve never gotten the hang of the “light touch.” I was definitely a pounder on my SRT, and it completely threw me off when I tried to make the touch lighter on it. I know I can write faster on the LS, I just don’t know if it helps me to go faster when my accuracy suffers.
I hate how nothing translates properly anymore. I’ve changed how I write so much from the StenEd that nothing is in my dictionary, it seems like. It makes me feel like I haven’t made any progress, like I’ve only gone backwards and it’s going to take forever to go forwards. I also put in ton of new suffixes and prefixes, but I haven’t learned any of them, so I never know how to write anything, and I always just write it the old way and it comes out wrong. I need to actually learn those prefixes and suffixes or having them in my dictionary isn’t doing me any good.
Wishlist
This is the list of things I need to get done, roughly in the order in which I plan to do them.
- Go back and add inflections for -ty/-fy/-vy/-ny (only 1800 entries left!)
- Change how -rate, -dor, -mon, -lish, -gree, -ple, -thor, -nate, and all words starting with ex- are defined
- Write through the Phoenix website's Conflict Finder Sentences and fix all instances of word boundary issues
- Delete any entries where -d is defined as TD
- Re-write/global all 92k dictionary entries to catch inflections and match my current writing style
- Delete briefs I don't use that came from the StenEd dictionary
- Edit some broadcast transcripts and global words/note errors
- Investigate drag/drop options in Eclipse
5.9
Another nice thing about Translation Magic is not seeing un-translates when I'm doing my speedbuilding work. It's so much nicer just to see a word in purple and add it to my dictionary than to see an un-translate. I found a lot of words today that it didn't pick up on, but they were pretty hard ones. I also discovered that it has no idea how to fix stacking.
I'm starting to pick up on my new minute, which is bad because that's when I start thinking I know how to write all the words and try to go faster, and then I lose accuracy and ultimately, speed. I got up to 223 wpm on the last couple of sentences today. I only spent about 15 minutes on dictionary work, but I got through about 98 entries. I have to go back through about 2,000 entries I made and didn't think about making plurals or other inflected endings for. Only 1900 left!
Present Day
I just got the Phoenix Fast Track to Machine Shorthand Speed book. A couple of days ago, I spent some time reading through the introduction. I agree with a lot of the principles and ideas, even though I learned StenEd writing theory, not Phoenix. The author, Carol, talks about how important it is to have accuracy before speed so that you can build your muscle memory and rely on your fingers to write strokes accurately without having to consciously tell your fingers where to go. I don't agree with Mark's strategy of getting something down for every word no matter how unreadable it is. Like Carol says, when you do that, you're just training yourself to write things incorrectly. You have to write them properly to build muscle memory.
Carol also advises "trailing," or staying about four words behind the speaker so you can pick up on phrases you might have briefs for, and also so you can keep a steady rhythm. She says students often incorrectly have bursts of high speed and then slow down. I've noticed myself that I have that problem. I write fast when I can, and then it throws everything else off, even though I try to keep a steady rhythm. It's so hard not to try to keep up with the speaker and write as fast as I can, or to take advantage of places where I can speed up. It's really interesting that Carol says the exact opposite thing that Mark does. Mark says, "write fast, faster than you can, and accuracy at lower speeds will follow." Carol says that speed is a natural outcome of accuracy, but accuracy is not a natural result of increased speed.
That's how I've always felt. I can't just write things as fast as I can, or it all comes out as slop, and I've always felt there wasn't any point in teaching myself to write slop. I think Mark can do that because he's more of a court reporter. I know he does, or has done, captioning, too, but I also know that out of all 5 years of results of the NCRA Realtime Contest that are listed on their website, he hasn't won a single one. He usually finishes around 5th or 7th, although he did tie for first in one literary portion of the contest.
The purpose of the Phoenix book is to eliminate hesitation, and I think it's going to be very helpful for me. You practice columns of similar words, with unrelated words interspersed throughout so you can work on transitions, writing each word to the beat of a metronome. I used that strategy before in school when the professor gave us a list of the thousand most frequently used words and had us practice them that way. It did seem to help a bit with speed, and of course I got better at writing those words. I'm excited to start improving my speeds on the words in the book, but there are 107 single-stroke exercises to go through.
The first day I spent a lot of time on it and made it through the first nine exercises, but the second day I only got through five. The book says to spend half an hour a day on it, but I don't have that kind of practice time, and Erik from depoman says 10-15 minutes a day is good, so I'm going to go with that. In 10 minutes today, I only made it through two of the exercises. At that rate, it would take me a month and half just to figure out what speed to start at on these exercises, and which ones I need to work on the most. Maybe I'll have some extra time for it sometime.
After the first day, I averaged all of my top speeds, and it was about 155. I don't get to write a speed down unless I got that exercise with 100% accuracy. Basically, I guess that means my realtime speed on new material is 155. I knew that already, though. I figured it was at about 160. That sucks. It makes me feel like I'm never going to get to 225, not any time soon, anyway. This will be a good gauge for where it is, though, since I don't take tests, so I'm excited to see that start improving, too.
I took the test to get into Caption Masters program, in January I think it was, and one of the suggestions the instructor had was that I add asterisks to all of my prefixes and suffixes. That's great idea, but it makes me also want to add asterisks to word parts that aren't really suffixes, like the "mers" in "customers." So I basically have to go through and re-define all 92,000 entries in my dictionary. I'm trying to fix things as they come up, but unfortunately, when something like "-ry" comes up, and there's 1,000 entries I have to fix, it takes me a while to do it, and then all these other things like "-mon" come up and I just have this massive list that I feel like I'm never going to get to, and I use about half an hour of my practice time a day on it, when I should probably be actually practicing, but I don't have time for everything.
Yesterday, instead of working on that, I decided to investigate the phonetics table. I thought I would have to add a bunch of things to make it work, but I couldn't really think of anything I do fundamentally different from the StenEd theory, so I just tried to add a few helpful things that I tuck now, and then I turned on Translation Magic. I had tried it a while ago, and it never really got anything right, so I turned it off until I could fiddle with it. Today was the first time I did my speedbuilding practice with it turned on, and I love it! I haven't had it come up with anything that I needed to alter my table for. It doesn't always know what I was trying to write, but about 90% of the time it does. The biggest problem I have is that it doesn't really catch things that I have briefs for, that I've misstroked. But I guess you can't expect to to know about those, because they don't really follow the to phonetics rules.
When I do my speedbuilding, I take a piece at 230 wpm, and I try to get it one minute at a time at speed. I practice the minute until I can write it at 95% accuracy, and then move on to the next minute, and then I write both minutes together at 95% accuracy, then move on to the third minute. It takes forever to go through a piece that way. Maybe too long. Maybe I should knock it back down a speed. But I was getting things at 214 really easily, so I don't know.
I've been working on this particular piece since March 27th, and I just started on the third minute today. I'm focusing especially hard this time on writing everything slowly and accurately, without trying to keep up with the speaker. I want to get my accuracy down pat and establish a rhythm. I got up to 187 wpm on it today. I think it took me two weeks for the first minute, three weeks for the third, and one week to get them both, so we'll see what kind of progress I can make, if I can keep up with this strategy.
Background
I'm 25 years old. I've lived in St. Louis, MO, my entire life. When I have the money, I want to move somewhere warm, probably California. I graduated high school with a 4.3/4.0 GPA, and in December 2007, I graduated from Lindenwood University with a 4.0 and Bachelor's in Spanish. I taught Spanish for a semester at my old high school, and then I taught for a semester at another high school. I was mostly interested in the career for the retirement benefits, and after a year, I decided they weren't worth being miserable for 30 years. I wanted something a little less interpersonal, so I had to find a new career.
I found out about court reporting by looking in the big book of jobs and how much they paid at the library. I was already thinking about medical transcription, since I could type 100 wpm and I didn't think I would get bored doing it, but I really wasn't interested in anything medical. Court reporting seemed easy enough, and in looking into it, I found out about captioning, which seemed even better. I love watching TV, so it seemed like it would be a pretty sweet gig to just type whatever I heard on TV.
I found out about court reporting by looking in the big book of jobs and how much they paid at the library. I was already thinking about medical transcription, since I could type 100 wpm and I didn't think I would get bored doing it, but I really wasn't interested in anything medical. Court reporting seemed easy enough, and in looking into it, I found out about captioning, which seemed even better. I love watching TV, so it seemed like it would be a pretty sweet gig to just type whatever I heard on TV.
I found a school based on which ones were NCRA accredited. I thought about a couple of online options, but I didn't like the idea of having to lay out $5,000 right at the outset. The only school in Missouri that was even participating (they weren't accredited at the time, although they are now) just happened to be the local community college, St. Louis Community College. I was able to enroll in classes about a week after they officially started, which turned out not to be a big deal at all. I wound up doing the entire program online. I took the first theory class that spring, and the second and last theory class that summer. Learning it was a breeze.
I did very well in all of my speed classes, and managed to stay almost a full semester ahead. Once you got to a certain point, though, if you were in the captioning program, you stopped doing the court reporter speedbuilding classes and started just using Realtime Coach for practice and testing. My teacher didn't think I really needed to do that, so I just signed up for Realtime Coach and started practicing on my own. I took both of the "Broadcast Captioning" classes at STLCC, but all they entailed was writing to TV and adding words to your dictionary based on what you wrote, as well as journaling about your reactions to each type of broadcast.
The next step after that was a captioning internship, which I had the required speed for, but the professor didn't feel comfortable having me represent the college because I hadn't taken medical and legal terminology. She suggested I talk to some captioning companies and see if I could work out some training with them. I'm sure that would have turned out great, since I could barely write at 180 at that point.
Ever since then I've just been using RTC to practice away on my own. I've been practicing about 2 hours a day the entire time I've been student, which I know isn't much compared to some people, but it's also more than others. I'm hoping to get in to the Caption Masters course, but you have to be at "court reporter speeds," and while I'm sure I'd easily be testing there now if I had kept taking tests, as it stands I've fallen out of test-taking mode and I'm not used to writing raw material even as slow as 180, although I'm practicing at 230.
I got my LightSpeed writer about two months ago, and learning to write on that has been a challenge. It allows me to write much faster, which isn't always a good thing, because I get tripped up trying to go so fast.
Somewhere back in September when I was still in the broadcast captioning class, I discovered Mark Kislingbury's StenoMaster theory and thought it was the greatest thing ever. I even bought the $260 book. I tried to write everything as "short" as I could, and lost a lot of speed trying to get my fingers into complex positions for briefs. That wasn't such a great idea, and now I just incorporate a few of the principles, like tucking K, R, S, and G.
I had the opportunity to observe a CART provider about a month ago, and although at first, when I thought CARTing was just following a deaf person around at school, I didn't like that idea at all, now that I know more about what CARTing is, I think that might be a great way to go, too. You can do remote CART from home, which I think I would like, but I also like being in the classrooms, so I think doing it in person would be fun, too. It seems like there's less pressure than with captioning, although I know it's still important to be the best you can and provide quality text.
I wrote this on my steno machine, and it's interesting how different my writing style is from when I type on a keyboard.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)