There was a post on the Eclipse FB group about being able to search the transcript for times when multiple words had been deleted, in order to help find things that needed to be globalled/worked on. It hadn't ever occurred to me before, but Julie pointed out that you could just search for the steno **. Duh! I started doing it a couple days ago, and it's been absolutely amazing.
It takes me five or six times longer to scan through a transcript now, but I'm also finding (and fixing) five or six times more mistakes than before, so it's worth it. It makes it really easy to see mistakes that you make repeatedly, and it's also easier to pick out patterns with stacking or splitting. I'm getting a *lot* more splitting than I was aware of. When I was writing and something would come out wrong, I wouldn't necessarily know why at the time, but I figured the most likely reason was that I stroked or missed an extra key. It turns out a lot of it is splitting!
I think there are lots of settings I can adjust on the IE to address splitting. One that I know about is minLR. I had tried to adjust it down to fix stacking, but it never worked, and I started getting noticeable splitting. I've been gradually turning it up every time I recognize splitting, but it turns out there were tons of times when I didn't know it was happening. I've been turning it up more over the past few days, and I think it might be causing more stacking.
I'm interested to really look into all the things I can tweak for splitting and stacking, but I'm going to wait until I get the Gen O. Then I'll call support and have them help me out.
Tons of other things are also coming from searching for double-deletes. It reminds me about words I knew I was consistently misstroking, but never seriously thought about changing, like TEPD. It should be "tend," but it translates as "tepid." Whenever I've seen it before, I thought, "well, it's a valid outline for tepid, so I'm going to leave it." But the odds are good that I would write "tepid" as TEP/ID, anyway, and I know it's come out wrong over and over again when I meant to right "tend," so I finally changed TEPD to "tend" and made T*EPD "tepid."
Another one I did it with was APS for "Annapolis." It's a great brief, and I do IPS for Indianapolis, too, but I frequently get "Annapolis" when I was trying to write "answer." When it happens, I just think "that darn Annapolist again" and delete it, so it doesn't show up in the transcript and I don't think about changing it. But when I found it this time, it didn't take long for me to realize that I should make A*PS "Annapolist" so that APS can just be "answer."
That's the real beauty of it. There are so many mistakes that I erase, so the consumer never sees them, but that means I don't see them to fix them in my dictionary, either. And I certainly don't remember any of them by the time I'm done writing. Another "hidden" thing that I can see now is briefs that I tried, but hadn't entered into my dictionary yet. I knew I had a brief for "Boca Raton," and BO*EK/RA*T made perfect sense, so I stroked it, but that wasn't right. I wrote out "Boca Raton" instead, and I would normally have no way of remembering I should go ahead and enter in BO*EK/RA*T, too. But this way I can see things like that and enter them.
And it's not just for briefs - it works for new ways of writing things that haven't been assigned to all the words yet, like SAIRBL for the "-sational" in sensational. I had really stopped trying to write things the short way, because they never came out right. But now at least if I write them and they're not in my dictionary yet, I'll know I can catch them later and put them in.
I'm also finding tons more words to add to my practice list. It's mostly not words that were difficult to stroke, because I often misstroked those and am able to add the misstroke to my dictionary. But what I am getting is reminders about words that I forget how to write, like "upwards." I could write it as *UP/WARDZ, UP/WA*RDZ, or *UP/WA*RDZ, but because it takes more effort to include the asterisk, the last time I wrote it, I just did UP/WARDZ, which is "up wards." So I put it on my practice list, and hopefully the week of reinforcement will be enough that I reflexively include the asterisk next time. Even though I know it needs to be there, the fact that I didn't put it in and had to back up to re-write it means it needs to be reinforced.
I've already recognized some misstrokes that I make a lot, but always erase, so I never fixed them, and I just keep writing them and having to delete and re-write them all the time, like REP/SHIP for relationship. I found that twice in one transcript, and then REG/SHIP in the next one. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was one that I get wrong all the time, but it never stuck with me long enough to define it.
So now when I edit a transcript for my own improvement (which I do with every event that I write), I follow these steps:
-Do separate searches for glued A and E to find most fingerspelled words
-Search for */*
-Search for untrans and unresolved conflicts
-Spellcheck in Eclipse
-Spellcheck in Word
I could also just search for * and I'm sure I would find even more strokes to fix, but I think correcting things that really tripped me up and forced me to delete multiple strokes is a good starting place for now. I've made 404 entries in three days using that technique!
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