2.19.13

I've developed a couple of new habits recently. Writing the same 10 minutes of a news show has allowed me to more easily identify words that give me trouble. I'm being a lot more "lenient" in terms of admitting that I have trouble with a word, and adding it to my practice list. It also gives me a chance to see lots of sentences where I wrote "an" as AN, even though I'm trying (unsuccessfully at this point) to write A*N.

I keep a record of every setence in which I wrote AN, and gradually add them to my daily practice. I write the whole sentence once, and then the phrase (i.e., "an extraordinary") five times. I'm finding that I never, ever get used to writing "A*N." It just doesn't feel comfortable. But I'm determined to do it. It's important to have a distinction between an, an-, and -en a. Once I'm comfortable with both the sentence and the phrase, I take it off the list and replace it with a new one. I have a mandatory 5-session minimum requirement on all the sentences, too.

It's really fun when names translate properly. I use NAO*EP for a "-ney" suffix, and I was able to write "Rodney" on the fly the other day, and have it come up even though it wasn't in my dictionary.

I finished re-writing/entering all the proper names in my dictionary. There were about 10,000, and it took me almost three months. Hopefully that will help them translate better now, though. I decided, rather than going through the rest of the dictionary, it would be more beneficial to go back to focusing on groups of words that I know I write differently than the way they're defined right now, so that's another thing I have to watch out for when I review the 10-minute takes.

In just 10 minutes of audio, I found issues with -lous, -rous, "yore" sounds (meteor, senior, etc.), and -mic. In fact, I discovered I had no idea how to write -mic. I have Mick, -mic, mic, Mc-, and mechanic, so it's tricky, but I think I'll remember -mic now. There aren't that many words with it, anyway; most words that end in -mic are written with a final IK.

I was able to go through those four sets pretty quickly, rewriting every word in the group to make sure it was defined the way I'm most likely to write it. That will be my first priority next time I find words like that, but until then, I think I'm going to go back to my pass through the theory book. I'll probably hit on some good word groups that way, and it's really beneficial to go back and see what fingering is tripping me up. The only problem is I've been writing with my steno machine on top of my theory book, so I'll have to find another book to write on.