I'm in a strange situation this semester. I have two classes over four days for the same student, and for whatever reason, that student often doesn't need CART for those classes. However, they don't notify the company, so I dutifully get all set up and ready to go every time, only to wind up with an extra hour and a half of free time on my hands. That adds up to six hours a week that I'm getting paid without having my time used up, so I've got a lot more time to work with this semester than I've had before.
I don't seem to get any more done than usual, but I do feel a lot more relaxed about things. At the moment, I'm booked solid for the next two weeks, which is a nice feeling. When I go into a week not having my normal amount of hours pre-booked, my schedule is totally up in the air. So far this semester I haven't had a time when I couldn't fill the hours by the end of the week, but it often comes down to booking something on Thursday for Friday, and it's stressful letting it go for that long. I could book something ahead of time for less money, but I'm experimenting with sticking to the rate I've set, and so far it's worked. I know I'll have to lower it for December and January, though, when there aren't going to be many classes to cover.
I thought about expanding my captioning hours during that time, but for now I think I'm just going to see what happens if I don't. I do average about two hours a week of captioning, so that will fill in the gaps at least a little bit. I've been doing a bit of government meeting work, but that's going to go away for December and January, too. I could send out "increased availability" emails to some companies that pay less than my rate but more than captioning, but I'm going to hold off on that for now, too.
I love the accuracy I'm able to get with CART. Even with captioning, my tran rate is usually 99.95% or better, and with CART it's typically 99.97% or better. And at least two-thirds of what didn't translate came out right anyway because of TM. I even get 100% all the time, and my wpm hits 300 quite a bit. My best average wpm for captioning is still around 215. I want it to be higher, but I don't get to practice captioning much. I write the news for four days straight, and I feel great about it by the fourth day, but then I have a week off from it before I do the four days again.
Showing posts with label CART. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CART. Show all posts
Including the Final P
I have two things I'm focusing on with my writing right now: -P and commas. I'm still working on that "stacking SKP" business, but I got it nailed down once classes started. I put SKP in as a conflict - with "and" as both choices - just so it would show up in green every time I stroked it to remind me to stop stroking it.
For some reason it didn't help much when I was mainly doing captioning, but almost the first day I switched to more CART, I got myself doing SKP-P at least 90% of the time. Maybe it's because I don't have much time to think during captioning, and even having just a few times during CART where I got to really think about it before I wrote it allowed it to become reflexive.
I completed my project of entering conflicts for "words that typically have commas after them." I had a list of 35, and I experimented with one a day until I had gone through the whole list. Some worked with two, three, or four options, and some I could tell weren't even going to work with two. Now the problem is that I never remember they're in there, and I just write the comma anyway. They come up in green, though, which reminds me that I'm supposed to be not putting the comma in.
I actually had myself pretty well trained with "so" and "okay," until I came into a bunch of instances where the AI wasn't picking correctly and I had to delete them. I'm doing the best with "well" and "all right"; I'm pretty sure none of the others have stuck at all. I seem to write "therefore," "however," and "in other words" the most, though.
Speaking of conflicts, I have an awesome one that works great: day to day versus day-to-day. The software is really good at knowing which is which, probably since one is just some words and the other is an adjective. I bet there are other things I could do that with (once-in-a-lifetime maybe?), but for now I'm just happy with "day to day."
Another thing I'm working on is waiting until the new sentence starts to put punctuation for the last one, so I can avoid when I think they're done, and I put a period, but then the next thing they say isn't a sentence on its own. It's hard to wait, though. Lots of times I can delete the period that turns out not to belong, but also lots of times I don't have time.
I also had to change my outline for a question mark. I think the S- key is stiff on this IE. It won't matter since I'm getting a new one, but I was almost never hitting the S- in STPH* for my question mark, and it kept coming out as N. I had the probablem occasionally with the LS, but it started to get really bad with the IE. I initially made a conflict, but the software wasn't choosing correctly often enough, and I would erase the N and re-write it three times and still get N, so I had to do something. It was getting bad! I wound up just making my question mark STPH*P, and I was so relieved to have a way to actually get a question mark to come out that I picked it up almost instantly.
The strange thing is that I drag the S in weird places on the IE, too, probably because I have the sensitivity set low since the key is stiff. Maybe it's not so strange, after all. The worst is when I think I've written "he," but it actually came out "she," and I don't notice it until it's too late. I keep getting "snot" for "not," too. I hope it's all better on the new machine!
For some reason it didn't help much when I was mainly doing captioning, but almost the first day I switched to more CART, I got myself doing SKP-P at least 90% of the time. Maybe it's because I don't have much time to think during captioning, and even having just a few times during CART where I got to really think about it before I wrote it allowed it to become reflexive.
I completed my project of entering conflicts for "words that typically have commas after them." I had a list of 35, and I experimented with one a day until I had gone through the whole list. Some worked with two, three, or four options, and some I could tell weren't even going to work with two. Now the problem is that I never remember they're in there, and I just write the comma anyway. They come up in green, though, which reminds me that I'm supposed to be not putting the comma in.
I actually had myself pretty well trained with "so" and "okay," until I came into a bunch of instances where the AI wasn't picking correctly and I had to delete them. I'm doing the best with "well" and "all right"; I'm pretty sure none of the others have stuck at all. I seem to write "therefore," "however," and "in other words" the most, though.
Speaking of conflicts, I have an awesome one that works great: day to day versus day-to-day. The software is really good at knowing which is which, probably since one is just some words and the other is an adjective. I bet there are other things I could do that with (once-in-a-lifetime maybe?), but for now I'm just happy with "day to day."
Another thing I'm working on is waiting until the new sentence starts to put punctuation for the last one, so I can avoid when I think they're done, and I put a period, but then the next thing they say isn't a sentence on its own. It's hard to wait, though. Lots of times I can delete the period that turns out not to belong, but also lots of times I don't have time.
I also had to change my outline for a question mark. I think the S- key is stiff on this IE. It won't matter since I'm getting a new one, but I was almost never hitting the S- in STPH* for my question mark, and it kept coming out as N. I had the probablem occasionally with the LS, but it started to get really bad with the IE. I initially made a conflict, but the software wasn't choosing correctly often enough, and I would erase the N and re-write it three times and still get N, so I had to do something. It was getting bad! I wound up just making my question mark STPH*P, and I was so relieved to have a way to actually get a question mark to come out that I picked it up almost instantly.
The strange thing is that I drag the S in weird places on the IE, too, probably because I have the sensitivity set low since the key is stiff. Maybe it's not so strange, after all. The worst is when I think I've written "he," but it actually came out "she," and I don't notice it until it's too late. I keep getting "snot" for "not," too. I hope it's all better on the new machine!
Already Waiting for Summer
I did a lot of captioning over the summer. About the middle of July, I realized that if I didn't make any changes, I was going to have the same amount of CART work for fall semester as I did for spring semester, and I didn't like the idea of that at all. So I started sending out my resume to some companies, slowly at first, and then doing more as I wasn't finding any with rates that I wanted.
I wound up applying at 35 places, which, in hindsight, may have been a bit much, but I wasn't getting any confirmations on fall classes being available, so I felt like I had to keep going. I actually wound up getting more offers for classes than I could even take from my main company; it seems like they have more work now than they did in the spring.
So right now I've got 13 hours a week in classes from them, plus this month I did 3 hours a week of captioning (trying to take it down to 2 for next month), and then I'm pretty sure I could fill in the rest with non-class hours from the main company. But if I were only with them, I'd have to do captioning during the summer, which isn't really where I want to be. The company I'm with now pays considerably less than CART, but I could always look for another company.
But, if I can cobble together enough CART companies with work over the summer, I may not need to do captioning at all. So I'm trying to balance about ten companies right now, hoping that they'll have summer work, too. Two of them have a lot of government meetings, though, and I guess those aren't going to carry over into the summer, so it might not actually be helpful at all. It's tough balancing all of it and I wish I could just drop the captioning hours now, but I feel like I need to wait and see what happens during the summer before I do that. Summer is so far away, though!
I wound up applying at 35 places, which, in hindsight, may have been a bit much, but I wasn't getting any confirmations on fall classes being available, so I felt like I had to keep going. I actually wound up getting more offers for classes than I could even take from my main company; it seems like they have more work now than they did in the spring.
So right now I've got 13 hours a week in classes from them, plus this month I did 3 hours a week of captioning (trying to take it down to 2 for next month), and then I'm pretty sure I could fill in the rest with non-class hours from the main company. But if I were only with them, I'd have to do captioning during the summer, which isn't really where I want to be. The company I'm with now pays considerably less than CART, but I could always look for another company.
But, if I can cobble together enough CART companies with work over the summer, I may not need to do captioning at all. So I'm trying to balance about ten companies right now, hoping that they'll have summer work, too. Two of them have a lot of government meetings, though, and I guess those aren't going to carry over into the summer, so it might not actually be helpful at all. It's tough balancing all of it and I wish I could just drop the captioning hours now, but I feel like I need to wait and see what happens during the summer before I do that. Summer is so far away, though!
More New Stuff
Another new idea I picked up comes courtesy of Phoenix theory, via Jade King on her FB group. I think Phoenix doesn't use the asterisk for conflicts, and they teach the idea of stroking R-R after something there might be a problem with. So, mat might be MAT, and Matt would be MAT/R-R. I absolutely love it! I've used it for all sorts of things - Mayhew, Wei, Wie, Barr, Busch, Cannes, Pitt, Starr..the list could be endless! I'm fairly good about being able to use the asterisk for things like that, or being creative like KA*UN for Kahn, but there's only so much I can think of. As with all things, now the problem will be remembering which things I used R-R for. But if anything comes up frequently enough that I can actually remember it, it will be an easy stroke to use.
No one ever really said a.k.a. much in CART, but it seems to come up a lot on TV. Not only is it annoying having to fingerspell it every time, it looks weird in all caps when the rest of the sentence is also in all caps, so I came up with AIK/R-R as an outline for it.
I've also made briefs for a couple buzzwords that come up a lot - best practices (BIKTS) and takeaways (TA*EZ).
It took me forever, but a few weeks ago I finally figured out how to do credits properly. They're supposed to pop on in their entirity regardless of the fact that most captioning is roll-up and done in two or three lines. At first I thought I would just have a stroke with the entire caption as the definition, but that was still roll-up. Then I figured out how to read in a block file, but with the stations that do two lines, for example, only two out of three credit lines were showing up. I knew I could probably just ask the captioning company or a FB group, but I was determined to figure it out myself.
I finally happened upon the answer in the sports section of the new NJCaptions (now C2CC) captioner's manual. You can put a "position" tag in your stroke that reads the block file; and you put the pop-on as a script command in that block file, and voila! If you're doing an opening credit, you can put the position tag for the rest of the programming in its own stroke, and stroke that after you do the opening credit to put it back to two lines or however many you need. I feel so much better now that I can do the credits properly!
No one ever really said a.k.a. much in CART, but it seems to come up a lot on TV. Not only is it annoying having to fingerspell it every time, it looks weird in all caps when the rest of the sentence is also in all caps, so I came up with AIK/R-R as an outline for it.
I've also made briefs for a couple buzzwords that come up a lot - best practices (BIKTS) and takeaways (TA*EZ).
It took me forever, but a few weeks ago I finally figured out how to do credits properly. They're supposed to pop on in their entirity regardless of the fact that most captioning is roll-up and done in two or three lines. At first I thought I would just have a stroke with the entire caption as the definition, but that was still roll-up. Then I figured out how to read in a block file, but with the stations that do two lines, for example, only two out of three credit lines were showing up. I knew I could probably just ask the captioning company or a FB group, but I was determined to figure it out myself.
I finally happened upon the answer in the sports section of the new NJCaptions (now C2CC) captioner's manual. You can put a "position" tag in your stroke that reads the block file; and you put the pop-on as a script command in that block file, and voila! If you're doing an opening credit, you can put the position tag for the rest of the programming in its own stroke, and stroke that after you do the opening credit to put it back to two lines or however many you need. I feel so much better now that I can do the credits properly!
Scripting Graduations
I'm scheduled to cover three graduations, starting with two tomorrow.
I got scripts for two of them. I've never used a script before. I saw
someone use one once, and they told me a few things. I also watched the
two-hour AccuCap training video, so I at least saw what's possible
there, although nothing really stuck concretely since it wasn't relevant
to me at the time. I spent about five or six hours formatting the first
script. It took me forever just to figure out how to name segments
using script commands.
I also learned that copying and pasting from Word is not a good idea, after I had already edited the entire script. I had to go back through and take out all these weird little places where the tabs in Word didn't show up in the script, but when I pushed them through realtime, they were making this weird arrow. I had to look up how to format songs, because at one graduation they're playing the National Anthem, and at both they're going to sing the Alma Mater.
I had to put tons of professor names in my dictionary, and text global all kinds of stuff to make sure it's going to come out capitalized properly even if I don't have time to do it manually. I put a little note to myself in the spaces where someone is likely to talk and it's not scripted, so I'll have a little bit of a head's up that I need to start writing. My biggest worry right now about the whole deal is that I'm going to accidentally send out one of those notes!
I don't have a script yet for the first graduation, and it's at 1:30 tomorrow. If I have to just write it live, at least I kind of know the process since I've read the scripts for the other two.
I was able to use a cool shortcut I saw on the Eclipse FB group to help me out with scripting. I tested out how I'm going to arrange everything on the actual day, and it was tough fitting all the windows in, so I got rid of the notes display with Ctrl+Shift+F5, which was a huge help.
I also learned that copying and pasting from Word is not a good idea, after I had already edited the entire script. I had to go back through and take out all these weird little places where the tabs in Word didn't show up in the script, but when I pushed them through realtime, they were making this weird arrow. I had to look up how to format songs, because at one graduation they're playing the National Anthem, and at both they're going to sing the Alma Mater.
I had to put tons of professor names in my dictionary, and text global all kinds of stuff to make sure it's going to come out capitalized properly even if I don't have time to do it manually. I put a little note to myself in the spaces where someone is likely to talk and it's not scripted, so I'll have a little bit of a head's up that I need to start writing. My biggest worry right now about the whole deal is that I'm going to accidentally send out one of those notes!
I don't have a script yet for the first graduation, and it's at 1:30 tomorrow. If I have to just write it live, at least I kind of know the process since I've read the scripts for the other two.
I was able to use a cool shortcut I saw on the Eclipse FB group to help me out with scripting. I tested out how I'm going to arrange everything on the actual day, and it was tough fitting all the windows in, so I got rid of the notes display with Ctrl+Shift+F5, which was a huge help.
Captioning Success
I didn't get any captioning jobs in April, but I did get put on the calendar for a few hours in May. Classes ended in April, so I have more availability now than I put on the sheet for that company. I kind of don't want to take on too much work until I get and get used to the IE, though. I wanted to let the company know I do have more availability before May 15th, when they make the schedule for June, but it's looking like the IE might not even get here by then. I'm pretty much holding off on all new prospects until I get used to the IE, though.
It was kind of sad when my classes ended, but it's been really nice not being locked into those classes this week. I captioned my first news broadcast last Friday. News is totally different from CART. It's harder to write. You don't really ever get time to get your footing before they switch to a new story, and you never know what the next topic is going to be. It's a lot easier on my arm, though. It doesn't hurt nearly as much. It only goes for about 12 minutes and then you get a break, and then four minutes, break, four minutes, you're done. If you only caption for half an hour, it's over before you know it.
The prep is insane, though. There's so much to prep for on a news station you've never done before. I was hoping I'd get to stick with one or two stations that I would cover multiple times this month, but I'm doing eight different stations. You could spend all day prepping news stories, too. At least the weather is nice and predictable.
It's really hard to get back into the rhythm of just letting the mistakes go when I caption. I have so much more time to fix things in CART. With captioning, if I take a second to try to fix it, I wind up getting totally hung up and missing a bunch of important stuff. The flow is just totally different. Practicing doesn't seem to help, either. It seems like the only effective practice is doing it for real. It doesn't help that I only got scheduled for weekends in May, even though I'm available at 5:00 central every day of the week. I did pick up one show next Wednesday at least.
It's pretty exciting getting to caption the news. It's definitely a wider audience than one consumer. I feel important when I do it, but there's also a lot more pressure. It's really easy to let the pressure get to me and start messing up, so I just have to try not to think about it, and pretend I'm just practicing.
It was really bad the first time I did it. There were so many things I hadn't ever done before, like putting on credits and dialing into an encoder. It was terrible thinking about it. I didn't want to do it at all. But like most things, it wasn't so bad, and I'm really glad I have that income channel now that classes are over.
The pay isn't nearly as good as CART though, and I didn't get many hours in May, so for the entire month I'm making less than what I made for a week of CART. But it's still valuable to have, and hopefully as the summer goes on I can pick up more hours. I had better; if I don't, I'm actually not going to make any profit. If it keeps going this way, I won't even pay for the cost of AccuCap/the other equipment/phone lines. AccuCap was a one-time cost, though, so I guess either way, having captioning during the summer will pay off in the long run.
I've gotten disconnected on two out of five encoder calls that I've made. I don't know if it was my lines or a problem with the encoder, but I hope it wasn't my lines, because I don't know the first thing about trying to fix them. I've heard some people have better luck with serial modems, as opposed to USB ones, so that might be the first thing I try. I know I'm not going to get anywhere with calling the phone company, so I really hope it doesn't come to that.
I captioned a couple of budget presentations for cities/counties for my original company this week. They talked so fast without any pauses, it really hurt my arm. One of them even went on for three hours and 20 minutes. My right arm and hand didn't hurt too much though, so maybe something like that will be feasible once I fix whatever's wrong with my left arm. They have a lot of events that go longer than three hours, but I just can't take them. Three hours is my limit.
It was pretty much exactly a year ago that I took my first jobs for that company. I did a couple similar events back then, even. I think my writing was about a thousand times better this time. It felt totally different. Last time I was really out of my depth. It felt totally comfortable this time, though.
It was kind of sad when my classes ended, but it's been really nice not being locked into those classes this week. I captioned my first news broadcast last Friday. News is totally different from CART. It's harder to write. You don't really ever get time to get your footing before they switch to a new story, and you never know what the next topic is going to be. It's a lot easier on my arm, though. It doesn't hurt nearly as much. It only goes for about 12 minutes and then you get a break, and then four minutes, break, four minutes, you're done. If you only caption for half an hour, it's over before you know it.
The prep is insane, though. There's so much to prep for on a news station you've never done before. I was hoping I'd get to stick with one or two stations that I would cover multiple times this month, but I'm doing eight different stations. You could spend all day prepping news stories, too. At least the weather is nice and predictable.
It's really hard to get back into the rhythm of just letting the mistakes go when I caption. I have so much more time to fix things in CART. With captioning, if I take a second to try to fix it, I wind up getting totally hung up and missing a bunch of important stuff. The flow is just totally different. Practicing doesn't seem to help, either. It seems like the only effective practice is doing it for real. It doesn't help that I only got scheduled for weekends in May, even though I'm available at 5:00 central every day of the week. I did pick up one show next Wednesday at least.
It's pretty exciting getting to caption the news. It's definitely a wider audience than one consumer. I feel important when I do it, but there's also a lot more pressure. It's really easy to let the pressure get to me and start messing up, so I just have to try not to think about it, and pretend I'm just practicing.
It was really bad the first time I did it. There were so many things I hadn't ever done before, like putting on credits and dialing into an encoder. It was terrible thinking about it. I didn't want to do it at all. But like most things, it wasn't so bad, and I'm really glad I have that income channel now that classes are over.
The pay isn't nearly as good as CART though, and I didn't get many hours in May, so for the entire month I'm making less than what I made for a week of CART. But it's still valuable to have, and hopefully as the summer goes on I can pick up more hours. I had better; if I don't, I'm actually not going to make any profit. If it keeps going this way, I won't even pay for the cost of AccuCap/the other equipment/phone lines. AccuCap was a one-time cost, though, so I guess either way, having captioning during the summer will pay off in the long run.
I've gotten disconnected on two out of five encoder calls that I've made. I don't know if it was my lines or a problem with the encoder, but I hope it wasn't my lines, because I don't know the first thing about trying to fix them. I've heard some people have better luck with serial modems, as opposed to USB ones, so that might be the first thing I try. I know I'm not going to get anywhere with calling the phone company, so I really hope it doesn't come to that.
I captioned a couple of budget presentations for cities/counties for my original company this week. They talked so fast without any pauses, it really hurt my arm. One of them even went on for three hours and 20 minutes. My right arm and hand didn't hurt too much though, so maybe something like that will be feasible once I fix whatever's wrong with my left arm. They have a lot of events that go longer than three hours, but I just can't take them. Three hours is my limit.
It was pretty much exactly a year ago that I took my first jobs for that company. I did a couple similar events back then, even. I think my writing was about a thousand times better this time. It felt totally different. Last time I was really out of my depth. It felt totally comfortable this time, though.
Career Outlook
I had to practice to the news a bit to do the testing for the captioning company, and I realized that they talk really fast on the news. It's terrible. I just feel like I'm getting hammered. It's at least an average of 200 wpm. Some of my classes are like that, and I hate those ones. It's probably just because it hurts a lot to write that fast, though.
But it made me realize how much I like CART. Sometimes it's boring, but lots of times I get to hear about really interesting stuff. I've been more grateful now that I get to do CART. It's especially nice when people talk slowly and I can get almost every word out perfectly, at like 99.9% accuracy.
I've been trying to bring more of a captioning philosophy into my CART. Flow is especially important in captioning. Words are scrolling by super fast. I've been given this advice before, but I didn't take it to heart as much as I should have - the idea that if you make a mistake and you can't correct it right away, don't correct it at all, or it will be really confusing. You don't want to have a wrong word, and then 15 words later put the correct word. It won't make sense anymore.
It's also difficult for the consumer if you keep backspacing, like erasing a bunch of words and then writing them again. Plus, for me, it trips me up and slows me down to do that, anyway. So I've been focusing more on just letting mistakes go and not trying to fix them, especially if they're ones where the intended word can easily be inferred. It's really hard, though. Whenver I see a mistake, I want to pounce on it and fix it. But it's important not to do that if it's going to mean I miss some stuff that comes after it.
I'm trying to be more conscious about what I'm writing. My instinct is to write as fast as I can and as much as I can, but that stresses me out and causes me to make more mistakes. I do much better, and actually get more of the content, if I just relax and allow myself room to paraphrase if I need to.
The owner of the captioning company said that "newbie" captioners tend to start out getting around 2000 words per half-hour broadcast. My tests were between 2800-3000, and she said 3000 was what a veteran captioner would get. So I'm not leaving out too much. I'm surprised I'm even getting that much. I checked on some transcripts from when I practiced to the news about a year ago, and they were around 2200. I guess I am getting better, whether it seems like it to me or not.
It's hard for me to believe I really am a professional. I've been working at it for so long, and it seemed like I wasn't making any progress and I wouldn't ever get here. I wasn't fully confident in myself when I got my first job. But now I've passed the CBC and CCP, and passed tests to get hired at numerous companies. All I see is the mistakes I constantly make every day, and it makes it seem like I'm not good at this. But I get great feedback from the consumers. My skills must be solid.
I'm finally earning enough to make a living doing this, and I really do do it well. I just wish it didn't hurt so much! I feel like I could take on a lot more work if I weren't limited by the pain. It seems like I can work about 4 hours a day without being in complete agony, so that's where I try to draw the line. I get jealous hearing about people who can work for 8 hours a day without pain, though.
It's scary thinking about when I do start captioning. I blocked off anything before 5p CT for CART, so I'm only available to caption during nights and weekends. I'm covering a class right now that meets 4 times in 8 weeks at 6p my time, and it seems like my arm hurts way worse at 6p than it does in the morning, regardless of how much writing I've already done that day. I'm dreading having to write an average of 200 wpm at night.
I have to have some kind of income during the summer, though. I might be able to piece together 20 hours of CART a week during the school year (it hasn't happened yet, but hopefully I'll land more permanent classes next semester than I did this semester), but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be getting much during the summer. And you can't just work for a company during the summer; you have to be available year-round if you want summer hours.
It all takes so much time to put together! I feel like I'm on the right track at least, though.
The worst is having to CART 3-hour classes. For some reason that seems to be a lot of what I get. My arm just doesn't hold up for 3 hours. I can go for about 45 minutes before I start really running into trouble. On the one hand, I wish I could just not offer to take those classes, but on the other, I don't think I would get much work if I didn't do them. There's usually a 10-minute break in the middle, but that doesn't help much.
I have 3 hours of CART scheduled for Sunday morning. That will be my first time working on the weekend, so it should be interesting. I had this Tuesday off, so I guess that was my Sunday. It just occurred to me that I get paid 15% extra for working on the weekend. That's the policy that the main company I do work for has. I love that company! They're the best. I want to try to do as much work as I can for them, but the problem will be if other companies offer me full-semester classes before that one puts out their schedule.
But it made me realize how much I like CART. Sometimes it's boring, but lots of times I get to hear about really interesting stuff. I've been more grateful now that I get to do CART. It's especially nice when people talk slowly and I can get almost every word out perfectly, at like 99.9% accuracy.
I've been trying to bring more of a captioning philosophy into my CART. Flow is especially important in captioning. Words are scrolling by super fast. I've been given this advice before, but I didn't take it to heart as much as I should have - the idea that if you make a mistake and you can't correct it right away, don't correct it at all, or it will be really confusing. You don't want to have a wrong word, and then 15 words later put the correct word. It won't make sense anymore.
It's also difficult for the consumer if you keep backspacing, like erasing a bunch of words and then writing them again. Plus, for me, it trips me up and slows me down to do that, anyway. So I've been focusing more on just letting mistakes go and not trying to fix them, especially if they're ones where the intended word can easily be inferred. It's really hard, though. Whenver I see a mistake, I want to pounce on it and fix it. But it's important not to do that if it's going to mean I miss some stuff that comes after it.
I'm trying to be more conscious about what I'm writing. My instinct is to write as fast as I can and as much as I can, but that stresses me out and causes me to make more mistakes. I do much better, and actually get more of the content, if I just relax and allow myself room to paraphrase if I need to.
The owner of the captioning company said that "newbie" captioners tend to start out getting around 2000 words per half-hour broadcast. My tests were between 2800-3000, and she said 3000 was what a veteran captioner would get. So I'm not leaving out too much. I'm surprised I'm even getting that much. I checked on some transcripts from when I practiced to the news about a year ago, and they were around 2200. I guess I am getting better, whether it seems like it to me or not.
It's hard for me to believe I really am a professional. I've been working at it for so long, and it seemed like I wasn't making any progress and I wouldn't ever get here. I wasn't fully confident in myself when I got my first job. But now I've passed the CBC and CCP, and passed tests to get hired at numerous companies. All I see is the mistakes I constantly make every day, and it makes it seem like I'm not good at this. But I get great feedback from the consumers. My skills must be solid.
I'm finally earning enough to make a living doing this, and I really do do it well. I just wish it didn't hurt so much! I feel like I could take on a lot more work if I weren't limited by the pain. It seems like I can work about 4 hours a day without being in complete agony, so that's where I try to draw the line. I get jealous hearing about people who can work for 8 hours a day without pain, though.
It's scary thinking about when I do start captioning. I blocked off anything before 5p CT for CART, so I'm only available to caption during nights and weekends. I'm covering a class right now that meets 4 times in 8 weeks at 6p my time, and it seems like my arm hurts way worse at 6p than it does in the morning, regardless of how much writing I've already done that day. I'm dreading having to write an average of 200 wpm at night.
I have to have some kind of income during the summer, though. I might be able to piece together 20 hours of CART a week during the school year (it hasn't happened yet, but hopefully I'll land more permanent classes next semester than I did this semester), but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be getting much during the summer. And you can't just work for a company during the summer; you have to be available year-round if you want summer hours.
It all takes so much time to put together! I feel like I'm on the right track at least, though.
The worst is having to CART 3-hour classes. For some reason that seems to be a lot of what I get. My arm just doesn't hold up for 3 hours. I can go for about 45 minutes before I start really running into trouble. On the one hand, I wish I could just not offer to take those classes, but on the other, I don't think I would get much work if I didn't do them. There's usually a 10-minute break in the middle, but that doesn't help much.
I have 3 hours of CART scheduled for Sunday morning. That will be my first time working on the weekend, so it should be interesting. I had this Tuesday off, so I guess that was my Sunday. It just occurred to me that I get paid 15% extra for working on the weekend. That's the policy that the main company I do work for has. I love that company! They're the best. I want to try to do as much work as I can for them, but the problem will be if other companies offer me full-semester classes before that one puts out their schedule.
12.7.13
I was feeling pretty confident about things after the CCP/CBC exam, and I decided I couldn't wait around anymore for my arm to feel better. I applied to about 15 CART companies trying to drum up some real work. I got promising responses from a few. It's three weeks later now, and I've only actually done any work for one, and that's only been a couple of hours. I'm hopeful about getting some classes from another next semester, but I'm not sure it'll be a full schedule.
I'm starting to have serious doubts about my ability to make a career out of CART. I don't like having downtime. I'd rather be working. Like it or not, I'm about to have an entire month off. I may actually have to invest in captioning. The good thing about that is I can start any time; it's not dependent on semester schedules.
I've been having a problem where I keep writng -fy as FAOI, even though that's "fie" and -fy should be FEU. I had SUR as Sur for some reason instead of sur-, which caused a problem somewhere, so I fixed that. I wrote that Frozen was a "prison success movie," which was just weird. I guess it's good that it translated that way, but I certainly didn't remember that I'm supposed to write "princess" as PRIN/S*ES. Maybe I should change prison to PR*IN.
Jill posted a brilliant idea on depoman. Instead of just having "-ville" and "-borough" and whatnot just attach, she has them defined to cap the previous word *and* attach to it! I updated a few pertinent entries of my own to do that, and it's totally awesome.
I also joined the Eclipse group on FB, where I've learned some great tricks. You can use ALT + S/ALT + A to add a single word to your spelling dictionary instead of having to run a spellcheck which pushes you down to the next misspelled word whether you wanted to go anywhere or not, which is a lifesaver. There's a command to bring up your steno notes if they're not showing up on a transcript.
The most important thing I saw was a reminder to upgrade to Version 6.0.0.12. I was on .9, and I don't even think I knew there was another update. If I did, I didn't know it was a stable one. I upgraded, and it turns out they fixed the auto-brief window so it works in keyboard macro output! They fixed it around the start of the semester. I *so* wish I had known that! It would've been amazing. I've got it going now, but there's only one week left in the semester.
I haven't had time for dictionary maintenence for a while, but there was a period where I was making good progress on it. I decided it made more sense for ya'll to be YAL and -ial to be Y*AL, so I changed 961 entries. I was really used to doing -ial as YAL, though, and it's not going over so well in my writing yet. -cade needed to be KA*ID to avoid conflicting with Cade, but there weren't many of those. Similarly, -tate (141 entries) got updated to TA*IT to avoid conflicting with Tate.
-gate (162) had to be GA*ET, for obvious reasons. I was writing -ality as ALT and it wasn't translating, so I did 434 of those. Latin was defined as LANT, which made sense. I'm not sure I actually even write it that way, but I updated 86 -lant entries to be LA*NT. -rate words (465) weren't working as RA*T, although I thought I fixed that already. I went ahead and did 84 -fied words as FAOID and FID, so that should work no matter which way I do it.
BER is ber-, so I updated -ber (208) as B*ER. "-zation" words (273) weren't coming out properly. I think I decided they should be fine as STKAIGS, but I defined them all as STKA*IGS for some reason. I wanted my para- prefix (232) to be PA*R, but it wasn't defined. -cate (238) wasn't working as K*AT. YOR is yore, so -ior (84) had to be Y*OR. I'd probably write yore as YOER, though, so I'm not sure I really needed to do that one.
I'm down to only 13 more problems to fix, so maybe I can get them done over winter break.
I'm starting to have serious doubts about my ability to make a career out of CART. I don't like having downtime. I'd rather be working. Like it or not, I'm about to have an entire month off. I may actually have to invest in captioning. The good thing about that is I can start any time; it's not dependent on semester schedules.
I've been having a problem where I keep writng -fy as FAOI, even though that's "fie" and -fy should be FEU. I had SUR as Sur for some reason instead of sur-, which caused a problem somewhere, so I fixed that. I wrote that Frozen was a "prison success movie," which was just weird. I guess it's good that it translated that way, but I certainly didn't remember that I'm supposed to write "princess" as PRIN/S*ES. Maybe I should change prison to PR*IN.
Jill posted a brilliant idea on depoman. Instead of just having "-ville" and "-borough" and whatnot just attach, she has them defined to cap the previous word *and* attach to it! I updated a few pertinent entries of my own to do that, and it's totally awesome.
I also joined the Eclipse group on FB, where I've learned some great tricks. You can use ALT + S/ALT + A to add a single word to your spelling dictionary instead of having to run a spellcheck which pushes you down to the next misspelled word whether you wanted to go anywhere or not, which is a lifesaver. There's a command to bring up your steno notes if they're not showing up on a transcript.
The most important thing I saw was a reminder to upgrade to Version 6.0.0.12. I was on .9, and I don't even think I knew there was another update. If I did, I didn't know it was a stable one. I upgraded, and it turns out they fixed the auto-brief window so it works in keyboard macro output! They fixed it around the start of the semester. I *so* wish I had known that! It would've been amazing. I've got it going now, but there's only one week left in the semester.
I haven't had time for dictionary maintenence for a while, but there was a period where I was making good progress on it. I decided it made more sense for ya'll to be YAL and -ial to be Y*AL, so I changed 961 entries. I was really used to doing -ial as YAL, though, and it's not going over so well in my writing yet. -cade needed to be KA*ID to avoid conflicting with Cade, but there weren't many of those. Similarly, -tate (141 entries) got updated to TA*IT to avoid conflicting with Tate.
-gate (162) had to be GA*ET, for obvious reasons. I was writing -ality as ALT and it wasn't translating, so I did 434 of those. Latin was defined as LANT, which made sense. I'm not sure I actually even write it that way, but I updated 86 -lant entries to be LA*NT. -rate words (465) weren't working as RA*T, although I thought I fixed that already. I went ahead and did 84 -fied words as FAOID and FID, so that should work no matter which way I do it.
BER is ber-, so I updated -ber (208) as B*ER. "-zation" words (273) weren't coming out properly. I think I decided they should be fine as STKAIGS, but I defined them all as STKA*IGS for some reason. I wanted my para- prefix (232) to be PA*R, but it wasn't defined. -cate (238) wasn't working as K*AT. YOR is yore, so -ior (84) had to be Y*OR. I'd probably write yore as YOER, though, so I'm not sure I really needed to do that one.
I'm down to only 13 more problems to fix, so maybe I can get them done over winter break.
WA CSR
I decided to sit for the Washington State Court Reporter Exam. I practiced takes at 200 wpm, one a day for two weeks. I had a really hard time finding any material at 200 wpm. I had some at 225, so I slowed it down to what should've been about 200. I did okay on the first few takes, but my accuracy got worse the more I did. When I ran out of those I started slowing down some at higher speeds, and I did even worse on those.
I wasn't really sure what my chances of passing were by the time the test rolled around. The information they sent said to go to the Technology Center, which was different from the building I go to for the NCRA exam. The TC was locked, but luckily the usual building wasn't very far, and that's where the exam was being held.
The staff was very friendly, and got me set up in a nice corner in the room. I had the option of writing the test on my laptop and then printing it on their printer, which was awesome. You have to bring your own printer for the NCRA exam, which I think is just silly. Luckily for the CBC/CCP you don't need a printer, anyway.
There was practice material playing, which was a little confusing because about 10 minutes before the test was supposed to start, the material said something along the lines of, "the practice is now over and we will begin the test." I didn't really want to practice much before the test. I figured with my arm problem it would just wear me out unnecessarily. I don't practice at all before I CART, and I do fine out of the gate, so I figured I don't need to practice for 20 minutes before an exam, either.
The proctor wasn't in the room at that time, though, so I thought surely that wasn't the test, and I took a chance and didn't write it. Luckily it wasn't the test. The gave me an envelope when I came in, to put my test in when I was done, and I looked inside it and there were instructions and grading rules. I was particularly interested in those since I hadn't been able to find them online before the test. I figured they were about the same as NCRA's anyway, though.
I was surprised to find out that you can turn in both transcripts if you want to, and they'll grade them both. The proctor read some instructions, and asked if there were any questions, and people actually asked questions, so I felt comfortable asking mine to verify about sending in both transcripts. The volume wasn't too loud, which was nice. It's always too loud at the NCRA exam, and it throws me off a little.
Part of the instructions for transcribing told you where each exam would stop/start being graded, since only 5 minutes out of a 7-minute take are graded. I didn't want to look at that before the exam, though, because I figured I would get nervous thinking "this is when the grading starts" or be anxiously waiting for when the grading would end.
When the proctor started the exam for real, there were two minutes of practic,e and then the exam. I did pretty well on it; not perfect, but I kept it together most of the time. I was expecting another two minutes of practice before the second take, so I was resituating and getting comfortable, and all of a sudden the second take started! I wasn't ready at all and I never regained my composure. It was a mess.
After the takes were over, we had 90 minutes to transcribe. It took me about an hour to transcribe the first take, and I felt like I had a maximum of about 11 errors. You're allowed something like 50, so I was feeling pretty good about it. One of the very first sentences said something about a man working somewhere for "# years," so that wasn't helpful at all. I had no idea what number I was trying to write. But it didn't really matter with that amount of errors.
Before the test, I thought I might turn in both transcripts. But since it took an hour to do the first one and I had mucked up the second one so badly, I didn't even look at it. I turned in my one transcript and left, and then I had the anxiety of worrying about "what if I didn't send in the right section" or "what if I didn't copy everything out of Eclipse properly," etc. Always something you can wish you had double checked.
The instructions said the results would be in after two weeks, but I thought that was a little too optimistic and tried not to think about them coming in at all. They really did come in about two and a half weeks later, though, so that's not bad at all. I was correct in thinking I had passed, so I'm now officially a WA CSR.
It's not really very exciting. It was definitely worth it to get some kind of certification, but it's not related to CART or captioning at all. It's a relief to know I can pass something at least.
I've got some new 180 takes I've been practicing this week for the NCRA exam next weekend, and I've been having mixed results. After seeing how many mistakes I made on the court reporter exam (that I was able to fix in the transcript), I felt like there was pretty much no chance of being able to pass the CCP this time. The CR exam was at 200 wpm, though, and the CCP is only 180, so maybe that will help. I think my nerves might get the better of me as usual, so I'm trying not to hold out much hope. I just have to keep trying, and sooner or later there will be an exam that's easy for me to write, and I'll pass it.
It's just so much pressure knowing I've only got one shot, and it has to be right the first time. I think knowing I got to fix it later and all I was trying to do was really get down notes for myself to be able to go off of helped a lot when I took the CR exam. I don't write well under pressure at all. Luckily when I CART I'm able to not think about the fact that someone's reading it and just do the best I can. I regularly get up to 260 wpm and I'm my accuracy is above 99%, so that works fine.
I wasn't really sure what my chances of passing were by the time the test rolled around. The information they sent said to go to the Technology Center, which was different from the building I go to for the NCRA exam. The TC was locked, but luckily the usual building wasn't very far, and that's where the exam was being held.
The staff was very friendly, and got me set up in a nice corner in the room. I had the option of writing the test on my laptop and then printing it on their printer, which was awesome. You have to bring your own printer for the NCRA exam, which I think is just silly. Luckily for the CBC/CCP you don't need a printer, anyway.
There was practice material playing, which was a little confusing because about 10 minutes before the test was supposed to start, the material said something along the lines of, "the practice is now over and we will begin the test." I didn't really want to practice much before the test. I figured with my arm problem it would just wear me out unnecessarily. I don't practice at all before I CART, and I do fine out of the gate, so I figured I don't need to practice for 20 minutes before an exam, either.
The proctor wasn't in the room at that time, though, so I thought surely that wasn't the test, and I took a chance and didn't write it. Luckily it wasn't the test. The gave me an envelope when I came in, to put my test in when I was done, and I looked inside it and there were instructions and grading rules. I was particularly interested in those since I hadn't been able to find them online before the test. I figured they were about the same as NCRA's anyway, though.
I was surprised to find out that you can turn in both transcripts if you want to, and they'll grade them both. The proctor read some instructions, and asked if there were any questions, and people actually asked questions, so I felt comfortable asking mine to verify about sending in both transcripts. The volume wasn't too loud, which was nice. It's always too loud at the NCRA exam, and it throws me off a little.
Part of the instructions for transcribing told you where each exam would stop/start being graded, since only 5 minutes out of a 7-minute take are graded. I didn't want to look at that before the exam, though, because I figured I would get nervous thinking "this is when the grading starts" or be anxiously waiting for when the grading would end.
When the proctor started the exam for real, there were two minutes of practic,e and then the exam. I did pretty well on it; not perfect, but I kept it together most of the time. I was expecting another two minutes of practice before the second take, so I was resituating and getting comfortable, and all of a sudden the second take started! I wasn't ready at all and I never regained my composure. It was a mess.
After the takes were over, we had 90 minutes to transcribe. It took me about an hour to transcribe the first take, and I felt like I had a maximum of about 11 errors. You're allowed something like 50, so I was feeling pretty good about it. One of the very first sentences said something about a man working somewhere for "# years," so that wasn't helpful at all. I had no idea what number I was trying to write. But it didn't really matter with that amount of errors.
Before the test, I thought I might turn in both transcripts. But since it took an hour to do the first one and I had mucked up the second one so badly, I didn't even look at it. I turned in my one transcript and left, and then I had the anxiety of worrying about "what if I didn't send in the right section" or "what if I didn't copy everything out of Eclipse properly," etc. Always something you can wish you had double checked.
The instructions said the results would be in after two weeks, but I thought that was a little too optimistic and tried not to think about them coming in at all. They really did come in about two and a half weeks later, though, so that's not bad at all. I was correct in thinking I had passed, so I'm now officially a WA CSR.
It's not really very exciting. It was definitely worth it to get some kind of certification, but it's not related to CART or captioning at all. It's a relief to know I can pass something at least.
I've got some new 180 takes I've been practicing this week for the NCRA exam next weekend, and I've been having mixed results. After seeing how many mistakes I made on the court reporter exam (that I was able to fix in the transcript), I felt like there was pretty much no chance of being able to pass the CCP this time. The CR exam was at 200 wpm, though, and the CCP is only 180, so maybe that will help. I think my nerves might get the better of me as usual, so I'm trying not to hold out much hope. I just have to keep trying, and sooner or later there will be an exam that's easy for me to write, and I'll pass it.
It's just so much pressure knowing I've only got one shot, and it has to be right the first time. I think knowing I got to fix it later and all I was trying to do was really get down notes for myself to be able to go off of helped a lot when I took the CR exam. I don't write well under pressure at all. Luckily when I CART I'm able to not think about the fact that someone's reading it and just do the best I can. I regularly get up to 260 wpm and I'm my accuracy is above 99%, so that works fine.
10.19.13
I'm still enjoying CART, although sometimes it can be pretty boring, and I look forward to classes where the instructors say more/faster so I don't have any downtime. And sometimes I have to shower after lunch, which kind of bugs me. But I think it's worth it. I wish I had more work. I don't have any classes at all on Fridays. But I'm only working for one company, so I haven't exactly run out of options on that front yet. I'm waiting until after the CBC/CCP exam on 11/1 so I can see how I feel about that before I reach out to more companies.
I love the idea of doing remote CART exclusively, but I don't like the idea of not working during the summer. I'm not sure what else I could do during the summer, though. I guess I could do some captioning, but I'd have to buy AccuCap, which is $3k, and I'd need to have phone lines installed, and get an audio coupler and all of that stuff. I guess it would be worth it to have income during the summer, but I wish there were an easier way to get summer work.
I've been going through my dictionary maintenance list, and I've noticed a disturbing trend of finding things that I wanted to go back and fix - like "-cal" words not working when I stroked K-L - that weren't defined that way just because it was wrong to write them that way. -cal is KA*L, and K-L is -cle, so of course "magical" wasn't defined as MAG/K-L. I should probably reinforce KA*L, not define all the -cal words as K-L and KA*L. I guess it doesn't hurt to have them in there as K-L, too, where it doesn't cause any conflicts.
I think the problem is when I'm doing realtime, I just write the first thing that comes to mind, and it isn't always the right thing, even though it makes sense at the time. I don't like going through and rewriting (in the case of -cal) 580 words the wrong way, though. I'm almost reinforcing the wrong thing. I always write the the right way, too, though, just to make sure it's in there that way as well. Hopefully just by writing all those words at least some way will stick and there won't be any hestitation the next time I write them.
I'm probably supposed to do -ice words as consonant + IS, but I wrote 253 of those as IS just in case. -cept works fine as SEPT, but sometimes I do it as SE*PT, so 27 of those work now. Dis- is just DIS, but some words sound like DIZ, so I fixed about 5 of those to work that way. -ling should be L*ING, but that's hard to write and something I think I just came up with myself, so it's not ingrained at all, and lots of times I wind up stroking LG. I have that defined as -ing for misstrokes, but I fixed it so 532 of those should work as -ling now. And -ious is typically YOUS, but I fixed 670 words so that YUS works, too.
I never seem to make any progress on my dictionary maintenance list. I cross things off, but then I add more things, so it never gets any shorter. I have 19 problems to address right now. I don't always spend a lot of time working on it, though. Starting next week I have to start practicing for the CCP/CBC, so I probably won't do much with it until after the exam.
I'm still having problems where I try to put asterisks on all of my ending word parts whether they need them or not. I wish I had just left my dictionary that way after I changed it to be like that. I guess hindsight is 20/20, though. And maybe there are a lot of endings that I didn't catch and hadn't changed, so I'm not as bad off as I think I am. For now, I'm still just trying to remember which ones need asterisks and which ones don't.
I'm trying to be a little less strict with the realtime rules. I have a lot of trouble trying to remember to write devastate as DEV/STA*IT. DEV is delve, so you can't write DEV/STATE or it would be "delve state." But who's ever going to say "delve state?" Someone sometime maybe, I guess. But "delve stating," is even less likely, so I finally broke down and just defined DEV/STA*IT/G as devastating. I've been trying to think about that kind of thing more often. It goes against all the rules of realtime, so I guess I'll find out sooner or later whether it hurts or helps.
I love the idea of doing remote CART exclusively, but I don't like the idea of not working during the summer. I'm not sure what else I could do during the summer, though. I guess I could do some captioning, but I'd have to buy AccuCap, which is $3k, and I'd need to have phone lines installed, and get an audio coupler and all of that stuff. I guess it would be worth it to have income during the summer, but I wish there were an easier way to get summer work.
I've been going through my dictionary maintenance list, and I've noticed a disturbing trend of finding things that I wanted to go back and fix - like "-cal" words not working when I stroked K-L - that weren't defined that way just because it was wrong to write them that way. -cal is KA*L, and K-L is -cle, so of course "magical" wasn't defined as MAG/K-L. I should probably reinforce KA*L, not define all the -cal words as K-L and KA*L. I guess it doesn't hurt to have them in there as K-L, too, where it doesn't cause any conflicts.
I think the problem is when I'm doing realtime, I just write the first thing that comes to mind, and it isn't always the right thing, even though it makes sense at the time. I don't like going through and rewriting (in the case of -cal) 580 words the wrong way, though. I'm almost reinforcing the wrong thing. I always write the the right way, too, though, just to make sure it's in there that way as well. Hopefully just by writing all those words at least some way will stick and there won't be any hestitation the next time I write them.
I'm probably supposed to do -ice words as consonant + IS, but I wrote 253 of those as IS just in case. -cept works fine as SEPT, but sometimes I do it as SE*PT, so 27 of those work now. Dis- is just DIS, but some words sound like DIZ, so I fixed about 5 of those to work that way. -ling should be L*ING, but that's hard to write and something I think I just came up with myself, so it's not ingrained at all, and lots of times I wind up stroking LG. I have that defined as -ing for misstrokes, but I fixed it so 532 of those should work as -ling now. And -ious is typically YOUS, but I fixed 670 words so that YUS works, too.
I never seem to make any progress on my dictionary maintenance list. I cross things off, but then I add more things, so it never gets any shorter. I have 19 problems to address right now. I don't always spend a lot of time working on it, though. Starting next week I have to start practicing for the CCP/CBC, so I probably won't do much with it until after the exam.
I'm still having problems where I try to put asterisks on all of my ending word parts whether they need them or not. I wish I had just left my dictionary that way after I changed it to be like that. I guess hindsight is 20/20, though. And maybe there are a lot of endings that I didn't catch and hadn't changed, so I'm not as bad off as I think I am. For now, I'm still just trying to remember which ones need asterisks and which ones don't.
I'm trying to be a little less strict with the realtime rules. I have a lot of trouble trying to remember to write devastate as DEV/STA*IT. DEV is delve, so you can't write DEV/STATE or it would be "delve state." But who's ever going to say "delve state?" Someone sometime maybe, I guess. But "delve stating," is even less likely, so I finally broke down and just defined DEV/STA*IT/G as devastating. I've been trying to think about that kind of thing more often. It goes against all the rules of realtime, so I guess I'll find out sooner or later whether it hurts or helps.
180
I really like doing CART. It's great not having to work weird hours like I would have to for captioning. And lots of times I wind up not having to actually do anything and I still get paid, which would never happen with captioning. Something's always going to be on the air, whether it's what you did prep for or not. The only bad part is that the audio isn't always that great. But I can only work with what I've got, and so far I don't think I've missed writing anything vital because of it.
I'm always more surprised by what's in my dictionary properly than by what isn't. "Hieroglyphics" came out perfectly the other day, and I already had "Micah" in there. Who knew? I have a bunch of math symbols in, like +, -, etc., and I've even got superscript set up. Auto Brief comes in handy a lot. In one of my classes, the instructor kept saying "prepositional phrase," which I write as PREP/SIGS/NAL/FRAIS, or PREP/SILGS/FRAIS if I'm feeling really confident. Auto Brief suggested "PRO*EP," which was a whole lot easier, and I wound up using that brief 30 times just for that one session.
My arm being messed up has really slowed down my progress on the Phoenix speed drills. It's just impossible to try to build speed with any kind of accuracy at this point. But I keep plugging along anyway, and sometimes I have good days with it. I finally hit a major milestone: I've got a speed of 180 wpm or better on every drill, and my average speed is 185 wpm now. Maybe that means I can finally pass the CBC/CCP this time. I'm not going to a concert the night before specifically so I won't have any regrets about it after the test, so it had better be worth it.
I've been getting some good dictionary maintenance in. I spent a couple hours on it one day, and added 956 entries. Per is P*ER because PER is per-, so I made sure all 253 -per entries were defined with P*R. I decided VAL should be Val, so I defined 84 -val entries as VA*L. I do -in and -en both as -N, so I made sure 993 -in entries and 1524 -en will work. And I guess there was something wrong with -eous words, because they were on the list, so I wrote all 126 of those.
I'm always more surprised by what's in my dictionary properly than by what isn't. "Hieroglyphics" came out perfectly the other day, and I already had "Micah" in there. Who knew? I have a bunch of math symbols in, like +, -, etc., and I've even got superscript set up. Auto Brief comes in handy a lot. In one of my classes, the instructor kept saying "prepositional phrase," which I write as PREP/SIGS/NAL/FRAIS, or PREP/SILGS/FRAIS if I'm feeling really confident. Auto Brief suggested "PRO*EP," which was a whole lot easier, and I wound up using that brief 30 times just for that one session.
My arm being messed up has really slowed down my progress on the Phoenix speed drills. It's just impossible to try to build speed with any kind of accuracy at this point. But I keep plugging along anyway, and sometimes I have good days with it. I finally hit a major milestone: I've got a speed of 180 wpm or better on every drill, and my average speed is 185 wpm now. Maybe that means I can finally pass the CBC/CCP this time. I'm not going to a concert the night before specifically so I won't have any regrets about it after the test, so it had better be worth it.
I've been getting some good dictionary maintenance in. I spent a couple hours on it one day, and added 956 entries. Per is P*ER because PER is per-, so I made sure all 253 -per entries were defined with P*R. I decided VAL should be Val, so I defined 84 -val entries as VA*L. I do -in and -en both as -N, so I made sure 993 -in entries and 1524 -en will work. And I guess there was something wrong with -eous words, because they were on the list, so I wrote all 126 of those.
Pain Update
I finished out all four weeks of my PT, and there wasn't any improvement. The physical therapist suggested I try a vascular surgeon next, but they required an ultrasound first, so I made an appointment with my PCP to see what she suggested. She was totally useless and just said I should do whatever the physical therapist said.
So, I had an ultrasound, and the technician said there seemed to be a little bit of restricted blood flow when I held my left arm straight up, but it wasn't really a big deal. My PCP thinks I should go see the vascular surgeon anyway, so I've got an appointment to do that on Monday. I don't feel like that's really the problem, though.
I have this weird spot on the front of my chest that hurts a lot sometimes. It started hurting after the not-my-usual physical therapist did some stuff with my arm. It's really bothersome, and it just started hurting on the right side in the same spot yesterday. Maybe it has something to do with the new way I sit when I write.
It's all really frustrating. I just started my first semester of classes, and I have a lot. Luckily a lot of them haven't actually needed CART for the first few days. I still get paid, but the student hasn't been there, or they've had technical difficulties, or whatever. One of my classes is super slow. My average for a 2-hour class is only 140 wpm. I love that class. I can even lean back and rest my arms on the arm rests when I write that one, and it doesn't hurt my arm at all.
I haven't been so lucky in any of the other classes, though, and it hurts a lot to write them. I know my writing would be better if I weren't favoring my left arm/hand, too. I'm not getting paid as much as I could be, and I feel like I don't want to start branching out until I get my arm fixed, but it feels like it's never going to happen at this point. It should be fixable. It should be something the doctors can figure out. It's a real thing, so why can't they determine the cause?
I wore my wrist brace for three weeks, at the suggestion of the neurologist. It didn't help my arm at all, so I stopped wearing it for about a week. Then my hand went numb for a whole day, so I decided to try the wrist brace again, and it's been feeling much better. I guess buying the brace wasn't such a waste after all.
So, I had an ultrasound, and the technician said there seemed to be a little bit of restricted blood flow when I held my left arm straight up, but it wasn't really a big deal. My PCP thinks I should go see the vascular surgeon anyway, so I've got an appointment to do that on Monday. I don't feel like that's really the problem, though.
I have this weird spot on the front of my chest that hurts a lot sometimes. It started hurting after the not-my-usual physical therapist did some stuff with my arm. It's really bothersome, and it just started hurting on the right side in the same spot yesterday. Maybe it has something to do with the new way I sit when I write.
It's all really frustrating. I just started my first semester of classes, and I have a lot. Luckily a lot of them haven't actually needed CART for the first few days. I still get paid, but the student hasn't been there, or they've had technical difficulties, or whatever. One of my classes is super slow. My average for a 2-hour class is only 140 wpm. I love that class. I can even lean back and rest my arms on the arm rests when I write that one, and it doesn't hurt my arm at all.
I haven't been so lucky in any of the other classes, though, and it hurts a lot to write them. I know my writing would be better if I weren't favoring my left arm/hand, too. I'm not getting paid as much as I could be, and I feel like I don't want to start branching out until I get my arm fixed, but it feels like it's never going to happen at this point. It should be fixable. It should be something the doctors can figure out. It's a real thing, so why can't they determine the cause?
I wore my wrist brace for three weeks, at the suggestion of the neurologist. It didn't help my arm at all, so I stopped wearing it for about a week. Then my hand went numb for a whole day, so I decided to try the wrist brace again, and it's been feeling much better. I guess buying the brace wasn't such a waste after all.
Struggle
I wound up doing a lot of CART/captioning work for the first three weeks. I got to cover a lot of the floor sessions for a state House of Representatives, so that was really cool. Now that it's summer, though, there's basically nothing. I also learned that writing for hours at a time sucks. Even just going for an hour, I couldn't find a comfortable position.
I think there's definitely something wrong with my left arm. I've been trying all kinds of stuff, and it's driving me crazy. I can barely write it hurts so much. I went to a Relax the Back store and checked out some chairs. They were nice chairs, but they didn't help with the pain at all. I was able to pivot the armrests to pretty much anywhere I wanted, and using one just made it worse. So a good chair isn't going to solve the problem.
I found a nice adjustable chair for $13 at Goodwill, and it beats the folding chair with pillows I was using before, even though it's not terribly comfortable. The seat is actually short enough that I can use my tripod with it, so I've been trying that out. It's nice to be able to vary the height of the machine so easily, although it doesn't seem to be helping much with the pain.
I always feel like I'm really struggling when I write these days, and so many errors could be avoided if I could just get comfortable. I'm still practicing to the news, and I'm always surprised that my accuracy is still above 98%.
The whole thing is frustrating though, because it's really holding me back. I'm not ready to apply for more places until I have it figured out, and I'm so close to being able to make a living with this! I got a taste of it, and it was great, and now it sucks going back to low-paying ways of making money.
I've been working on "sub-" words, trying to get myself to remember that I want to write them as S*UB. My instinct is to put the asterisk in the attached word, but that usually doesn't work out very well. I actually wrote "subculture" properly during a job because of it, so that was a good moment.
I found out that "loon" wasn't in my dictionary at all. Crazy (no pun intended). I've been making good progress with the dictionary maintenance. 227 -ma entries corrected to MA*, 404 -ler as L*ER, 319 -gy which I guess I just needed to enter even though I haven't changed the way I write it, and the same for 2512 -ation. That last one was a project for a while.
I think there's definitely something wrong with my left arm. I've been trying all kinds of stuff, and it's driving me crazy. I can barely write it hurts so much. I went to a Relax the Back store and checked out some chairs. They were nice chairs, but they didn't help with the pain at all. I was able to pivot the armrests to pretty much anywhere I wanted, and using one just made it worse. So a good chair isn't going to solve the problem.
I found a nice adjustable chair for $13 at Goodwill, and it beats the folding chair with pillows I was using before, even though it's not terribly comfortable. The seat is actually short enough that I can use my tripod with it, so I've been trying that out. It's nice to be able to vary the height of the machine so easily, although it doesn't seem to be helping much with the pain.
I always feel like I'm really struggling when I write these days, and so many errors could be avoided if I could just get comfortable. I'm still practicing to the news, and I'm always surprised that my accuracy is still above 98%.
The whole thing is frustrating though, because it's really holding me back. I'm not ready to apply for more places until I have it figured out, and I'm so close to being able to make a living with this! I got a taste of it, and it was great, and now it sucks going back to low-paying ways of making money.
I've been working on "sub-" words, trying to get myself to remember that I want to write them as S*UB. My instinct is to put the asterisk in the attached word, but that usually doesn't work out very well. I actually wrote "subculture" properly during a job because of it, so that was a good moment.
I found out that "loon" wasn't in my dictionary at all. Crazy (no pun intended). I've been making good progress with the dictionary maintenance. 227 -ma entries corrected to MA*, 404 -ler as L*ER, 319 -gy which I guess I just needed to enter even though I haven't changed the way I write it, and the same for 2512 -ation. That last one was a project for a while.
Rejected
I got a rejection letter from one of the companies I applied to a while ago. I sent them a realtime sample from when I did meeting minutes for the water district. They said my accuracy was decent (98.7%), but they didn't want to hire me because I had too many commas. Commas! I just took it to mean that they're not looking to take any beginning CART providers under their wing, so to speak. They're only interested in hiring people who could go out and work with no modifications. Which is fine. But I really could've just written fewer commas, if I had known ahead of time.
It's something to think about in my writing, though. I do tend to put in a comma when someone pauses. I try to look at CART from a consumer standpoint, a readability standpoint. If the professor is one of those that's constantly going "right? all right?", I don't put it in. I hate hearing it all the time, so I wouldn't want to read it all the time, either. Excessive utterances like "um" and "uh" don't need to be in there, eunless I need to convey what type of speaker they are, which isn't really necessary with a professor.
I've always written punctuation. There hasn't ever been a point in my training when I didn't think it was necessary. So, of course I punctuate things. But I never really thought about having too many commas. I just figured it was the way people talked, so it was okay. But I guess I need to look at it more aggressively from a readability standpoint, and write it the way it makes the most sense, not necessarily the way it was said. If they're going on for too long, I can break it up into two sentences. If they paused in the middle of a thought, and it looks better without the comma, I don't have to write it.
On a less disappointing note, I've been impressed with a lot of words that are in my dictionary. It's fun to just stroke out names like "Gunther" and "Mahoney" however I think I should, and have them actually translate. Same thing with some technical terms, like "thermosphere" and "ventricles." The technical stuff isn't always in there, but when it's not, it either looks close enough, or I can fingerspell it.
I also had an awesome breakthrough the other day. I have to have the cursor in a certain window to stream the CART, so I thought I couldn't have Eclipse up. But I figured out that the window with the cursor in it isn't really important for me to see, and I can make it tiny, and make Eclipse big enough to see. There was a huge delay with the CART getting to the cursor window, and it made it really hard to edit as I was writing.
But now, I can watch it in Eclipse, just like when I practice. It comes up instantly, and I can fix any mistakes right away. It actually tired me out a little the first time I did it. I wound up writing more because I didn't have to wait so long to see if what I was writing came out right or not.
It's something to think about in my writing, though. I do tend to put in a comma when someone pauses. I try to look at CART from a consumer standpoint, a readability standpoint. If the professor is one of those that's constantly going "right? all right?", I don't put it in. I hate hearing it all the time, so I wouldn't want to read it all the time, either. Excessive utterances like "um" and "uh" don't need to be in there, eunless I need to convey what type of speaker they are, which isn't really necessary with a professor.
I've always written punctuation. There hasn't ever been a point in my training when I didn't think it was necessary. So, of course I punctuate things. But I never really thought about having too many commas. I just figured it was the way people talked, so it was okay. But I guess I need to look at it more aggressively from a readability standpoint, and write it the way it makes the most sense, not necessarily the way it was said. If they're going on for too long, I can break it up into two sentences. If they paused in the middle of a thought, and it looks better without the comma, I don't have to write it.
On a less disappointing note, I've been impressed with a lot of words that are in my dictionary. It's fun to just stroke out names like "Gunther" and "Mahoney" however I think I should, and have them actually translate. Same thing with some technical terms, like "thermosphere" and "ventricles." The technical stuff isn't always in there, but when it's not, it either looks close enough, or I can fingerspell it.
I also had an awesome breakthrough the other day. I have to have the cursor in a certain window to stream the CART, so I thought I couldn't have Eclipse up. But I figured out that the window with the cursor in it isn't really important for me to see, and I can make it tiny, and make Eclipse big enough to see. There was a huge delay with the CART getting to the cursor window, and it made it really hard to edit as I was writing.
But now, I can watch it in Eclipse, just like when I practice. It comes up instantly, and I can fix any mistakes right away. It actually tired me out a little the first time I did it. I wound up writing more because I didn't have to wait so long to see if what I was writing came out right or not.
4.30.13
I finally got to do some CART work. My first day, I wound up covering four events. Two classes, one bidder's meeting that ran short, and one council meeting that I covered the last hour of because it ran long. I wound up working from about 8 in the morning until 11 at night, trying to get all the transcripts out. It was a crazy day.
I was supposed to cover a class the next day, but it got cancelled. I did a couple the day after that, and that was last week. I did another one this morning. I haven't officially checked my accuracy, but it's looking good. I didn't have any drops, and everything made sense. I think the semester's about to end, though. There might not be any classes to cover after this week.
It took me less than the length of the class to edit my transcript today. It probably shouldn't take as long as it does, but I like to go through and global everything, and make the transcript look perfect. It'll take less time the more practice I get.
I'm also trying to focus on practicing for the CBC. That's been going well. The 180 takes are a lot easier this time around than they were in January. I'm just trying to focus on staying calm. Lots of times I've written a take for the first time, and thought I didn't get it, but I did. So that's giving me confidence to just keep focusing, keep going, and know that there's a real possibility that even though it doesn't feel like it, I might pass the take.
I finished -i endings, and I'm working on 1765 for -o now. I don't remember why I wrote down that I need to work on -o. I write it "OE," which hasn't changed. But it doesn't hurt to write a bunch of words; lots of them aren't defined the way I'm writing them.
I found a bizarre dictionary hole. "Pens" wasn't in my dictionary as PENZ, and it translated as "ends." I also discovered, during CBC practice, that I need to take out my glue stroke when I take the test. I have it in as DRA*ES, since I use it before a web address. DRAES is just "address." I wrote DRA*ES in a take without realizing it, and glued the entire rest of the take together! That would've been an instant fail.
I'm still working on positioning. My left arm still isn't cooperating. I can almost never seem to get it in a position that's comfortable. I don't know what the problem is, but I wish I knew what to do about it, because it makes it really hard to write for more than about 10 minutes at a time. It's supposed to be so much better to write on the LS, but it's just not working.
It didn't work on the Stentura, either, so it's not the LS' fault, but I know I would write a lot better if I could ever get the positioning down. It's gotten to the point where I dread having to CART a class because I know it's going to hurt. It shouldn't be that way, but I just don't know how to fix it. It only hurts when I write, so it's got to be something about the way I sit or hold that arm when I write. I don't have any problem at all with the right arm. If only I could figure it out!
I was supposed to cover a class the next day, but it got cancelled. I did a couple the day after that, and that was last week. I did another one this morning. I haven't officially checked my accuracy, but it's looking good. I didn't have any drops, and everything made sense. I think the semester's about to end, though. There might not be any classes to cover after this week.
It took me less than the length of the class to edit my transcript today. It probably shouldn't take as long as it does, but I like to go through and global everything, and make the transcript look perfect. It'll take less time the more practice I get.
I'm also trying to focus on practicing for the CBC. That's been going well. The 180 takes are a lot easier this time around than they were in January. I'm just trying to focus on staying calm. Lots of times I've written a take for the first time, and thought I didn't get it, but I did. So that's giving me confidence to just keep focusing, keep going, and know that there's a real possibility that even though it doesn't feel like it, I might pass the take.
I finished -i endings, and I'm working on 1765 for -o now. I don't remember why I wrote down that I need to work on -o. I write it "OE," which hasn't changed. But it doesn't hurt to write a bunch of words; lots of them aren't defined the way I'm writing them.
I found a bizarre dictionary hole. "Pens" wasn't in my dictionary as PENZ, and it translated as "ends." I also discovered, during CBC practice, that I need to take out my glue stroke when I take the test. I have it in as DRA*ES, since I use it before a web address. DRAES is just "address." I wrote DRA*ES in a take without realizing it, and glued the entire rest of the take together! That would've been an instant fail.
I'm still working on positioning. My left arm still isn't cooperating. I can almost never seem to get it in a position that's comfortable. I don't know what the problem is, but I wish I knew what to do about it, because it makes it really hard to write for more than about 10 minutes at a time. It's supposed to be so much better to write on the LS, but it's just not working.
It didn't work on the Stentura, either, so it's not the LS' fault, but I know I would write a lot better if I could ever get the positioning down. It's gotten to the point where I dread having to CART a class because I know it's going to hurt. It shouldn't be that way, but I just don't know how to fix it. It only hurts when I write, so it's got to be something about the way I sit or hold that arm when I write. I don't have any problem at all with the right arm. If only I could figure it out!
Headway
I'm finally starting to feel good about my realtime. Out of the last three news broadcasts I've practiced, my lowest accuracy was 98.83%. I'm starting to not get freaked out when I make a mistake, and be aware of what's being said while I fix mistakes. I still haven't gotten any work from the company I signed a contract with, though. I'd really like to get my feet wet and see where I stand on some actual CART work.
I'm feeling so confident that I even sent out "applications" to five CART/captioning companies, but I haven't heard anything back. It's frustrating because I've been working so long to be "ready," and now that I've put myself out there, no one seems interested in taking me on.
I'm intimidated by the captioning aspect, too. I live in an apartment, and we don't have a single landline, let alone the three or four I might need for captioning. We only have basic cable, and if I started captioning the traditional way, I'd have to buy a TV, modem, coupler, and amplifier, at least, plus AccuCap, which would be $3k alone. I have enough saved up for all of those things, but I'd much rather not have to get them.
In less stressful news, I finally hit an average of 180 wpm on all of my speed drills! I've been gunning for that goal for a while. I'm also doing a lot better making my corrections make sense when I practice realtime; making sure I have a dash before and after the correction word, if it doesn't come right after the error. I was having a problem with dashing before and using a comma after, but that's only happening rarely now.
I finally finished all my -NAIR corrections, and I've moved on to -ia, which I now write as KWRA*. Nothing in that group of 744 words seems to be defined the way I write it now, so that's my next project.
I made some changes to auto-brief; namely, I learned that you can tell it not to suggest certain letter combinations, which is really helpful. I don't ever write -TD or -SZ (or at least, not on purpose), and now I won't get suggestions with them. I also noticed sometimes it would suggest a brief with -TZ in it, which was just crazy (for me, anyway). For some reason after I did that, I lost my pop-up window. It was really weird, and I couldn't figure out how to get it back, until a few days later, it magically reappeared on its own!
I'm feeling so confident that I even sent out "applications" to five CART/captioning companies, but I haven't heard anything back. It's frustrating because I've been working so long to be "ready," and now that I've put myself out there, no one seems interested in taking me on.
I'm intimidated by the captioning aspect, too. I live in an apartment, and we don't have a single landline, let alone the three or four I might need for captioning. We only have basic cable, and if I started captioning the traditional way, I'd have to buy a TV, modem, coupler, and amplifier, at least, plus AccuCap, which would be $3k alone. I have enough saved up for all of those things, but I'd much rather not have to get them.
In less stressful news, I finally hit an average of 180 wpm on all of my speed drills! I've been gunning for that goal for a while. I'm also doing a lot better making my corrections make sense when I practice realtime; making sure I have a dash before and after the correction word, if it doesn't come right after the error. I was having a problem with dashing before and using a comma after, but that's only happening rarely now.
I finally finished all my -NAIR corrections, and I've moved on to -ia, which I now write as KWRA*. Nothing in that group of 744 words seems to be defined the way I write it now, so that's my next project.
I made some changes to auto-brief; namely, I learned that you can tell it not to suggest certain letter combinations, which is really helpful. I don't ever write -TD or -SZ (or at least, not on purpose), and now I won't get suggestions with them. I also noticed sometimes it would suggest a brief with -TZ in it, which was just crazy (for me, anyway). For some reason after I did that, I lost my pop-up window. It was really weird, and I couldn't figure out how to get it back, until a few days later, it magically reappeared on its own!
Proficient
I tested out my skills on QVC and The Weather Channel, and I did
great. I even got above 99% on the weather. I did those two, plus three
national news broadcasts and four local ones. My lowest rate was 98.1%,
and when I averaged them all together, it came out at 98.55%. So, obviously, I don't always hit 98.5% accuracy, but 98% is the minimum to get hired at some companies, at least. And if I could get a gig captioning something like QVC or the weather, I'd be set.
I decided to start out checking back in with the company I shadowed classes for in November. They said my notes looked good, so I got all set up with them. I bought the professional version of Eclipse, since I'll be using it for profit now. I didn't need to get the AccuCap portion, so that was $3,000 off the price, but I'm sure I'll wind up getting it sooner or later. Since it's the middle of the semester, the only CART work they've got is basically just filling in during emergencies. I was hoping I'd get more experience than that, but I guess it's only logical.
I still hate doing "homework." It's such a drag practicing for two hours every day, first thing in the morning. I would feel bad if I didn't do it, though. Lazy. And it's not like I'm doing anything else all that important or interesting. I was so disappointed the first time I failed the CBC, feeling like "now I have to go back to doing homework." For some reason I thought if I passed, I wouldn't have to do it anymore. I felt the same way to a certain degree when I was getting set up with this company. I had planned to keep up with the reinforcement/speed drills/dictionary maintenance, but at least I'd get paid for the "realtime practice" part, instead of doing the news for no one every day.
But the reality is, I don't think I'm anywhere near "perfect" at this yet (and I suppose no one ever is). As long as there are words that are difficult for me to write (which will probably be forever), I have to carve out time every day to practice them. Until I can do all the drills at at least 225, I have to keep doing them. And until there's nothing in my dictionary that's incongruent with how I'm writing it, I have to keep fixing things. No matter where I get hired, for how many hours, the "homework" isn't going away. That doesn't make it any easier to keep doing, unfortunately.
I decided to start out checking back in with the company I shadowed classes for in November. They said my notes looked good, so I got all set up with them. I bought the professional version of Eclipse, since I'll be using it for profit now. I didn't need to get the AccuCap portion, so that was $3,000 off the price, but I'm sure I'll wind up getting it sooner or later. Since it's the middle of the semester, the only CART work they've got is basically just filling in during emergencies. I was hoping I'd get more experience than that, but I guess it's only logical.
I still hate doing "homework." It's such a drag practicing for two hours every day, first thing in the morning. I would feel bad if I didn't do it, though. Lazy. And it's not like I'm doing anything else all that important or interesting. I was so disappointed the first time I failed the CBC, feeling like "now I have to go back to doing homework." For some reason I thought if I passed, I wouldn't have to do it anymore. I felt the same way to a certain degree when I was getting set up with this company. I had planned to keep up with the reinforcement/speed drills/dictionary maintenance, but at least I'd get paid for the "realtime practice" part, instead of doing the news for no one every day.
But the reality is, I don't think I'm anywhere near "perfect" at this yet (and I suppose no one ever is). As long as there are words that are difficult for me to write (which will probably be forever), I have to carve out time every day to practice them. Until I can do all the drills at at least 225, I have to keep doing them. And until there's nothing in my dictionary that's incongruent with how I'm writing it, I have to keep fixing things. No matter where I get hired, for how many hours, the "homework" isn't going away. That doesn't make it any easier to keep doing, unfortunately.
New Focus
It seems like I haven't done anything drastic since September. I finished out the Caption Masters Series. I found it to be helpful in two major ways. First, it got me in the habit of striving for a stricter accuracy rate. I had been happy with 95% previously (why?), and the class made me realize 98.5% is a much more beneficial goal. And, as I mentioned before, the idea of "smart writing" was totally new to me. It's definitely the way you have to go with CART or captioning, so I'm glad I'm transitioning over to it now.
I responded to an ad advertising work for students at 185 wpm or better. I'm definitely in that category. It turned out to be a CART opportunity. I got to "shadow" a couple classes and turn in an unedited transcript. The speaker was very slow, and I knocked it out of the park. I barely had any drops, and certainly none that were vital to the content. I got better than 99% accuracy on what I wrote. I never heard back from the company after I sent in my transcripts, which I was pretty disappointed about, but there are plenty of companies out there to apply with when I feel like I've got a product worth selling.
However, that experience was also greatly beneficial in that it gave me an opportunity to feel like I was writing for a viewer, not just for practice. I realized that when I write for a viewer, I've got to look at what I'm writing. I can't just have mistakes going out willy-nilly, even if my accuracy rate is 98% or better. And I've got to practice fingerspelling, not just in general, but specifically while I'm writing. I had never tried to do it before. If I heard a proper name, I'd just stroke it out however I thought best, then during review I'd count it as an error and enter it in my dictionary.
That's not going to fly on air, or with a student. I need to be able to fingerspell things when I hear them, and not just that, but keep paying attention to what's being said as I'm fingerspelling so I can write that, too. One of my main focuses in practice now is to watch the screen, catch mistakes as I make them, dash, and fingerspell. I have a huge hangup with seeing a word that didn't translate (either because I stroked it incorrectly, or because it's just not in my dictionary the way I just decided it should be written), and stopping and completely ignoring what's said after it so I can write it 2-3 more times and see if I can get it to come up right.
So very wrong! The client doesn't want to see 3-4 weird, wrong versions of a word someone said. At best, I need to dash it, fingerspell it, and move on - at worst, I need to just move on. It's tough stuff, though. Just watching the screen alone is a challenge. It slows me down mentally. It's taxing to think about how to write things when I'm also reading what I just wrote and listening to what I need to write next.
The third thing I'm focusing on right now is drops. I have a couple of problem areas. Often when a person's name and title are given, I completely lose it and write only their first name. That's not acceptable. The client needs to know who that person is.
I also have hangups every now and then where I'll get lost, frustrated, and just completely stop writing for about a sentence. I feel like I just need to focus on composure. Aside from that, though, my accuracy's usually pretty good. I've been practicing to a rotation of 30 minutes each of ABC World News, CBS Evening News, PBS NewsHour, and a local news show. I'm only dropping one or two important titles/facts per show, and my accuracy is almost always above 98%. I feel like I am getting close to having a marketable product.
Whew, that took forever! About three hours, if you can believe it. I really shouldn't go such a long time without updating!
I responded to an ad advertising work for students at 185 wpm or better. I'm definitely in that category. It turned out to be a CART opportunity. I got to "shadow" a couple classes and turn in an unedited transcript. The speaker was very slow, and I knocked it out of the park. I barely had any drops, and certainly none that were vital to the content. I got better than 99% accuracy on what I wrote. I never heard back from the company after I sent in my transcripts, which I was pretty disappointed about, but there are plenty of companies out there to apply with when I feel like I've got a product worth selling.
However, that experience was also greatly beneficial in that it gave me an opportunity to feel like I was writing for a viewer, not just for practice. I realized that when I write for a viewer, I've got to look at what I'm writing. I can't just have mistakes going out willy-nilly, even if my accuracy rate is 98% or better. And I've got to practice fingerspelling, not just in general, but specifically while I'm writing. I had never tried to do it before. If I heard a proper name, I'd just stroke it out however I thought best, then during review I'd count it as an error and enter it in my dictionary.
That's not going to fly on air, or with a student. I need to be able to fingerspell things when I hear them, and not just that, but keep paying attention to what's being said as I'm fingerspelling so I can write that, too. One of my main focuses in practice now is to watch the screen, catch mistakes as I make them, dash, and fingerspell. I have a huge hangup with seeing a word that didn't translate (either because I stroked it incorrectly, or because it's just not in my dictionary the way I just decided it should be written), and stopping and completely ignoring what's said after it so I can write it 2-3 more times and see if I can get it to come up right.
So very wrong! The client doesn't want to see 3-4 weird, wrong versions of a word someone said. At best, I need to dash it, fingerspell it, and move on - at worst, I need to just move on. It's tough stuff, though. Just watching the screen alone is a challenge. It slows me down mentally. It's taxing to think about how to write things when I'm also reading what I just wrote and listening to what I need to write next.
The third thing I'm focusing on right now is drops. I have a couple of problem areas. Often when a person's name and title are given, I completely lose it and write only their first name. That's not acceptable. The client needs to know who that person is.
I also have hangups every now and then where I'll get lost, frustrated, and just completely stop writing for about a sentence. I feel like I just need to focus on composure. Aside from that, though, my accuracy's usually pretty good. I've been practicing to a rotation of 30 minutes each of ABC World News, CBS Evening News, PBS NewsHour, and a local news show. I'm only dropping one or two important titles/facts per show, and my accuracy is almost always above 98%. I feel like I am getting close to having a marketable product.
Whew, that took forever! About three hours, if you can believe it. I really shouldn't go such a long time without updating!
Background
I'm 25 years old. I've lived in St. Louis, MO, my entire life. When I have the money, I want to move somewhere warm, probably California. I graduated high school with a 4.3/4.0 GPA, and in December 2007, I graduated from Lindenwood University with a 4.0 and Bachelor's in Spanish. I taught Spanish for a semester at my old high school, and then I taught for a semester at another high school. I was mostly interested in the career for the retirement benefits, and after a year, I decided they weren't worth being miserable for 30 years. I wanted something a little less interpersonal, so I had to find a new career.
I found out about court reporting by looking in the big book of jobs and how much they paid at the library. I was already thinking about medical transcription, since I could type 100 wpm and I didn't think I would get bored doing it, but I really wasn't interested in anything medical. Court reporting seemed easy enough, and in looking into it, I found out about captioning, which seemed even better. I love watching TV, so it seemed like it would be a pretty sweet gig to just type whatever I heard on TV.
I found out about court reporting by looking in the big book of jobs and how much they paid at the library. I was already thinking about medical transcription, since I could type 100 wpm and I didn't think I would get bored doing it, but I really wasn't interested in anything medical. Court reporting seemed easy enough, and in looking into it, I found out about captioning, which seemed even better. I love watching TV, so it seemed like it would be a pretty sweet gig to just type whatever I heard on TV.
I found a school based on which ones were NCRA accredited. I thought about a couple of online options, but I didn't like the idea of having to lay out $5,000 right at the outset. The only school in Missouri that was even participating (they weren't accredited at the time, although they are now) just happened to be the local community college, St. Louis Community College. I was able to enroll in classes about a week after they officially started, which turned out not to be a big deal at all. I wound up doing the entire program online. I took the first theory class that spring, and the second and last theory class that summer. Learning it was a breeze.
I did very well in all of my speed classes, and managed to stay almost a full semester ahead. Once you got to a certain point, though, if you were in the captioning program, you stopped doing the court reporter speedbuilding classes and started just using Realtime Coach for practice and testing. My teacher didn't think I really needed to do that, so I just signed up for Realtime Coach and started practicing on my own. I took both of the "Broadcast Captioning" classes at STLCC, but all they entailed was writing to TV and adding words to your dictionary based on what you wrote, as well as journaling about your reactions to each type of broadcast.
The next step after that was a captioning internship, which I had the required speed for, but the professor didn't feel comfortable having me represent the college because I hadn't taken medical and legal terminology. She suggested I talk to some captioning companies and see if I could work out some training with them. I'm sure that would have turned out great, since I could barely write at 180 at that point.
Ever since then I've just been using RTC to practice away on my own. I've been practicing about 2 hours a day the entire time I've been student, which I know isn't much compared to some people, but it's also more than others. I'm hoping to get in to the Caption Masters course, but you have to be at "court reporter speeds," and while I'm sure I'd easily be testing there now if I had kept taking tests, as it stands I've fallen out of test-taking mode and I'm not used to writing raw material even as slow as 180, although I'm practicing at 230.
I got my LightSpeed writer about two months ago, and learning to write on that has been a challenge. It allows me to write much faster, which isn't always a good thing, because I get tripped up trying to go so fast.
Somewhere back in September when I was still in the broadcast captioning class, I discovered Mark Kislingbury's StenoMaster theory and thought it was the greatest thing ever. I even bought the $260 book. I tried to write everything as "short" as I could, and lost a lot of speed trying to get my fingers into complex positions for briefs. That wasn't such a great idea, and now I just incorporate a few of the principles, like tucking K, R, S, and G.
I had the opportunity to observe a CART provider about a month ago, and although at first, when I thought CARTing was just following a deaf person around at school, I didn't like that idea at all, now that I know more about what CARTing is, I think that might be a great way to go, too. You can do remote CART from home, which I think I would like, but I also like being in the classrooms, so I think doing it in person would be fun, too. It seems like there's less pressure than with captioning, although I know it's still important to be the best you can and provide quality text.
I wrote this on my steno machine, and it's interesting how different my writing style is from when I type on a keyboard.
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