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.
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