Operation Delete All Asterisks

     I also had time to actually start on the VITAC book.  The very first thing it talks about is distinguishing starting, middle, and ending sounds.  For example, with the long E, it says you should do RE to start, no matter what the spelling is, RAOE in the middle, and RI at the end.  That’s actually what I already did when I learned StenEd, but then I added an asterisk to RI, because I thought it would conflict with things like ridiculous, which I wrote with RI.

     I did a horrible job recording what I changed, with StenoMaster and my asterisks and suffixes and everything, so I decided that with the VITAC book, I was going to make a list of everything I changed and actually practice and learn all of it.  I realized, though, that I never fully, 100% committed to and learned the asterisk in all of the -y endings -- -ty, -ry, -ly, etc.  So I had to put them on the list of things I needed to practice and learn. 

     And then I thought, since I never really learned this asterisk business in the first place, and since the VITAC book is going to have a different solution for any possible conflict I would have had that I was trying to avoid by using the asterisks…why keep trying to learn the asterisks?  Why not just go back to writing everything the StenEd way, and only make changes from the VITAC book?

     It was an incredibly freeing thought.  I haven’t made any progress at all in my writing for the past ten months because in September, I started with the StenoMaster, and in January I gave up on that and started with the asterisks, and somewhere in there I added all of these suffixes. I literally have 2000 suffixes and 500 prefixes. All of that pretty much destroyed my writing altogether. 

     Of course, now it’s going to be hard to unlearn what I have trained myself to do with the asterisks, but I think it will be for the best.  There are a few suffixes I’m going to have to remember to do with asterisks.  I looked through the entire VITAC book last night to see just how many there were.  It only took about half an hour, and I discovered that there aren’t many.

     I think giving up on these asterisks, and all the extra prefixes and suffixes that I never learned anyway, is the most exciting thing in steno since I learned about StenoMaster, which I was quite excited about.  The VITAC book actually does suggest one StenoMaster principle, which is using F instead of S/K, so BAFK instead of BAS/K.  That's still a hard one for me, but I've never stopped trying to use it.

    Unfortunately, now I have to go through my dictionary and delete all the things I put in with asterisks, which is going to be quite a project indeed.