I started going through my dictionary and trying to change all the initial "z"s from S* to STK. The VITAC book says I should, and I’ve had some problems with the S*, so I decided I might as well. As I was painstakingly updating 200 entries, I started to wonder how much I really needed words like "marbelization" in my dictionary. I got through all of those, and then I decided to just look at all instances of "z" so I could catch everything that I needed to change, and I decided I should probably wait and make sure that change is going to "stick" before I spend all that time changing my dictionary.
When I first started incorporating StenoMaster, I loved the idea of doing "–ss" as -S and "sses"/"ces" as -SZ. But I eventually realized that my fingers aren't that accurate, and I have trouble writing SZ quickly, so I should probably just save that for special things I already learned it for, like "less" vs. "–less" and "miss" vs. "mis-". I just now went through and deleted all 194 entries that needed to be changed back.
I decided a while ago that SWR- was a cool way to write "shr-" instead of SH/R, but of course I never did anything about it, so when that came up in the VITAC book, I went through and fixed all 94 entries of that. The StenEd dictionary came with all of those words defined twice with the same outline, one with an asterisk and one without. I have no idea why.
I also decided to adopt the method of distinguishing between words like "cash" and "carb" by writing "carb" as CAURB a while ago. Luckily there aren’t many words like that and I had fixed most of them already, but I went through and double-checked that list, too.
The VITAC book doesn’t like the idea of writing words like "bask" in two strokes, which StenoMaster taught me to stop doing anyway, but I went through and made sure that all 74 words like that were now correct in my dictionary. Most of them were, thanks to having come up in the "–sk" exercise in the Phoenix drill book.
The VITAC book also introduced me to the idea of writing words like "drank" as DRAFRNG. I’d probably noticed that on depoman before, but it just seemed weird. I write it now as DRA*NG, but when I saw it in the book, I tried it out, and I realized it’s the same thing, you just don’t have to move your index finger over as far. I guess it’s a better idea, because I always had a hard time with "-nk" words, anyway. I decided not to change those entries yet though, since it’s another one that’s going to be a big project
The book also says you should distinguish between "comp" and "ex", because StenEd says to use KP for both, which does create some conflicts. I think I’ve got that mostly under control though, since I learned which ones to watch out for in theory class, so I’m just going to leave it. The book says to use –GT for –TH so you can have *T open for proper nouns, but -GT would really mess up my words like "netting", so I’m not doing that, either.
It says to use –FT for –ST for the same reason, but I think that would be too much of a change for me to worry about right now when it hasn’t been a problem yet anyway. It also says to do –FRB for –V, but that’s really hard for me to stroke, so I’m not doing that, either. And of course, the biggest suggestion I’m ignoring is to not incorporate any endings. I don’t see any reason to give that up.
So I sort of finished another section of the book, by just about skipping half of the ideas and saving the other half for later. I also discovered that "snooze" wasn’t in my dictionary.
I got this
BackJoy thing, and I kind of like it, and I think I’m going to keep it, but it changes my posture, so now I have to figure out all over again where to put the Report-It, and I’m not having much success yet, which means I’m not making much progress on this minute, which is also super fast. I did get up to 250 wpm at the end of it today, though.
