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.

     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.