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.
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