Tips from Kosmo

I think I've settled into a good work routine. I have 13 hours a week standard with classes, which seems to be the perfect number, and I fill in the rest with teleconferences and government meetings. I wasn't too thrilled about the government meetings, but I figured it would be good to work for companies that might have work during the off season; only after I accepted the offers did it occur to me that there probably won't be that much government work during off times. It's still a good standby to have, though.

Writing this post reminds me I think it's time to make some more three-stroke briefs. Apparently I've written avant-garde 987 times, but it doesn't seem like I write it enough that I would remember a brief for it. I tried to do briefs for five words last time, and only three of them "stuck." I've written "especially" 1700 times the three-stroke way, and since I made a brief for it four months ago, I've written it in one stroke 1800 times, so that's definitely the shining example.

"Agriculture" and "organic" were also successful. Now I'm going to try to remember "invitation" and "degrees," which didn't stick last time, and I guess I'll go down the list in order and do "avant-garde," too. I did start using the degree symbol when I write the weather, though, so that's one degree-related practice that stuck.

Another awesome trick I learned from Kosmo's Korner is the "join paragraph" macro. I knew you could join paragraphs, but I never thought of doing it while realtiming. There are tons of times, though, when I start a new paragraph, and then one or two sentences into the paragraph, someone else says something, and I wish I could stick those one or two sentences back onto the first paragraph. And now I can! It doesn't affect StreamText, but it does make the transcript look a lot better. It's a little bit corny, but it's like Kosmo says - it's all about making you look better.

I had a bit of trouble making it work because I only have one space after a period by default, but when the paragraphs joined, there were two. I had noticed that in editing, too, and it was really annoying, so I called support about it, but they didn't know what to do. Then I realized that at least during realtime, I was using a macro, so I could just program the macro to delete the extra space, which I did, and now it's perfect!

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.