Finessing

The only major problem I'm having with my writing right now seems to be stacking "and." I stack it with everything. People really advise against writing APBD,  so I decided to change it to SKP-P. It's super easy to stroke, but the problem is I never do it, and I stack like three things with "and" on every single job. It's really annoying. Whenever I notice myself stack it, though, I'm trying to erase the mistake and force myself to write SKP-P instead. It doesn't seem to be working yet, but I remember when I felt like it was going to be absolutely impossible to write punctuation with both hands, so I guess I'll make it happen eventually.

I also randomly stroke the initial S sometimes, or maybe it's the initial and final Ss. I'm hoping that will stop with the new machine, though. And a lot of time, I'll accidentally stroke initial T when I mean to stroke S, and then I try to erase it but I stack the S and the asterisk, so I wind up with "it S."  I haven't even trade to think of a plan for fixing that one. The obvious answer would be to change the definition for S*, but then I'd have to change the entire alphabet, and it seems to work all right for the most part, so I don't really want to do that. I have used things like S-PG for that alphabet before, but I seemed to get tripped up. I also get tripped up a lot with the asterisk alphabet, so maybe it doesn't matter which one I use. It is a lot easier to fingerspell when you're captioning and you don't have to worry about upper and lower case. 

I'm pretty much guaranteed to stack "can you" at the beginning of a sentence, too. I haven't been able to train myself to be cognizant of that and stop doing it yet.

I found a huge issue with my awesome "speaker IDs in slop strokes" strategy. I wound up getting words like "bliss" coming up as crazy words because I had PWHREUS as a possible misstroke for TKPWHREUS. Of course, if it's something like TKPWHR-D, which could be misstroked as PWHR-D (BL-D), then it's not a problem, because I don't want that to be a word, anyway. At first I thought I would just deal with the words as they popped up, but then they started getting embarrassing. I was on air trying to write about a "fly ball," and the only way to keep it from coming out as "glioball" was to fingerspell it. Every time I wrote TPHRAOEU, it got auto-corrected to TKPWHRAOEU, which is apparently my prefix for glio-, not that I ever use it.

So I looked at the possible misstrokes, and identified anything like fl-, bl-, gr-, etc. that could actually combine with things to form a word, and then I looked at all my final bank combinations with those, and got rid of any words like fleck, Greg, etc. Then I bolded those initial combinations in my master list, and now whenever I add a secondary bank combination to the slop strokes, I check first to make sure it's not a word and get rid of it if it is. I'd rather have "fly" come out when I was going for the speaker ID for "Brian" than not be able to write fly at all.