4.20.13

I have had a couple of minor successes. I seem to be writing faster when I "talk to myself" during practice. It used to be always around 150, but now it's consistently getting up to 214. Maybe that's a sign of a faster writing mentality overall. I'm also getting better at realizing that a word probably isn't in my dictionary - or at least not the way that first comes to mind to write it - and fingerspelling it on the fly. I did a great job getting Adriatic and panacea like that the other day, without skipping a beat.

I also had the brilliant idea to start defining things that I often immediately dash, like cruise for crews. Crews is supposed to have an asterisk, and lots of times I'll remember that - right after I stroke cruise. So I defined "cruise -- crews" as "crews." I've done that with about 40 entries now. It hasn't actually helped yet, but it should in theory. According to the dictionary, the only stroke like that I've ever actually used is H-F D-RB, which would be me stroking a hyphen followed by a dash, which I wanted to translate as only a dash. Since creating it a month ago, I've used it 14 times. Apparently I write "hyphen dash" a lot.

I'm also trying to fix a problem where I'll write something, know or hear that a new speaker is coming up, stroke the >>, and then read that something in the previous speaker didn't translate properly. I have time to fix it, but not time to delete the >> and fix it, and without thinking, I just dash and fix it. It's weird, though. The new speaker isn't saying the correction. I have to just let it go. I'm past the point where it makes sense to fix it. So, what I'm trying to do is wait until everything tranlates out before I stroke the >>. I'm not having much success with that yet.

I finished all my -ia corrections, and now I'm working on 1086 entries that end in "i." I put most of these things on my list so long ago I don't remember exactly what was wrong with them anymore. Back in my "defining suffixes" days, I defined all the "-i"s as consonant + I + *P, so -ni is N*IP. I was really only intending to use it for name-building, but I use it for pretty much everything now. Unfortunately, nothing is defined that way, so it creates a lot of problems.