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!

Back

Long time no post, again. I've still been plugging away with my two hours of practice every day. I kept up with my routine of using the actual live news for my speedbuilding practice until June, when I started doing the Caption Masters Series. I didn't exactly test into it, I just signed up for it, figuring I was probably good enough to do it. That's been true in some senses; I don't have any trouble at all keeping up with the homework, but I have yet to pass a test. You have to get 98.5% accuracy first-pass on live broadcasts, and I'm not quite there yet.

So far I've practiced the news and the weather. I can occasionally get a 5-7-minute weather segment at 98.5% accuracy on the first try, which is pretty cool. The teacher suggested we use "smart writing," which involves dropping adjectives and other things that might not be super important if it keeps us from dropping things that are important. It's been pretty effective. On the one hand, it's easier because you don't have to write things verbatim; on the other hand, it's harder because it adds an extra level of things you're thinking about the whole time. "What phrase wasn't important? What don't I have to write? How could I paraphrase that to make it quicker?" Of course, verbatim is always your ultimate goal. But it's more important to convey everything loosely than to convey half of it verbatim. Unfortunately, it's a strategy that's going to work against me whenever I take the CBC exam.

I don't use the tripod anymore. I felt like I couldn't reach the machine, so I went back to putting it on my lap. I just use a little leather portfolio folder to give it about 3/4 of an inch of extra height and keep it flat. That seems to be working out okay. I still feel like I'm a little shaky 75% of the time in terms of "finding" the keys, but I'm doing a lot better in that area than I was before.

I have a ton of free time to do steno stuff now, but I don't do it. I did spend about an hour working on a list of 30 "to-do" items I had come up with in the past few months, though. Here's what I fixed: 

-Defined "out-" as "O*UT," yet I still had ~50 words in my dictionary defined like RAED/O*UT.

-Finally went into my pre/suf table and deleted all the StenoMaster stuff I don't actually use - the integrated -able, -en, -ful, -ive, -ize, -ment, -ness, dis-, and -ly. Hopefully that will result in TM suggesting fewer of those, although I've already got so many defined it's kind of a mess.

-Deleted 300 entries I made using "DZ" for "-ing."

-Fixed problematic word endings with -lick, -rat, -line, -rid, -rig, -man/-men, -woman/-women, -ard, -son, and -gan.

-Updated my "ego-" to AOEG.

-Updated "TAIR" to "TA*IR" in 100 words.

-Decided to do LAM/NAIT, etc. and NA*IT for Nate; COMP/KAIT, etc., and KA*IT for Kate

-Finally got around to changing all 113 of my leftover "nk" words from "*NG" to "FRNG"

I came up with a couple more things to fix after I did that. I also just started defining conflicts. I think I've stayed away from them all this time because I didn't want to take the time to sit down and train the AI. But I defined one, and it picked up on it almost immediately, so I thought, what better time to work out the kinks than when no one can see them?

Horses

     I have been trying to use the Report-It.  I think it is probably the most frustrating thing I have ever done in my life, even worse than getting used to the LS, which took about three months, and which I had just barely accomplished when I got the Report-It.  I really just want to throw it out the window, and then go outside and attack it.  I have tried so many positions of the Report-It and the writer and my arms and everything.  I can never tell what I need to do to fix it, and I’m using all of my practice time on adjusting it instead of practicing, so I’m losing major time on that front.  Every time I leave it in the best position I could figure out, and then the next day I come back to it and it’s totally wrong and I have to start all over again.

     Today I had someone help me so I could make sure my elbows were at a right angle, so at least I have that figured out now.  I’m not giving up, though.  I have to make it work, because now that I’ve been using it, it hurts more not to use it, although I can’t write hardly at all while using it.  I have the arm position down I guess, I just need to get the machine in the right spot for where my arms are, but I’m not used to writing like this at all.

     I think I’ve officially given up my dream of taking the Caption Masters class in July.  I didn’t realize how horrible my writing had become.  It’s kind of ironic that if I hadn’t done what the instructor suggested, I would probably be fast enough for the class by now.  But since I added the asterisks, I can’t write anything anymore, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to.  Originally, I was planning to be done with school by August at the latest.  I wonder if I would be fast enough if I hadn’t changed so many things?  After I didn’t make it into the Caption Masters class in January, I figured I’d be at 180 for sure in a couple of months, and I’d get into the class for July, and finish it in November, and be ready to work then. 

     But now that’s not going to happen, so I guess I just don’t have a timeline at all, and the best I can hope for is that it doesn’t take me seven years like it does most people.  The average time to become is court reporter is five years, and then people usually spend at least a couple years doing that before they can caption.  It’s so hard going through and trying to learn to do everything perfectly.  Sometimes I just wish I could quit and find something to work towards where I could see actual progress, and have a timeline, and know that I was on the right track to getting done by a certain date.

     I’ve been trying to sound things out when I fingerspell them, so hopefully that’s a good strategy, because I’m getting better at it.  I made it halfway through the drill book, well, more than halfway by now because I’m on exercise 70, but that’s just depressing because all I seem to be doing is discovering all the finger positions I never quite mastered and am going to have problems with.

Square One

     I’ve been feeling very frustrated with my writing lately.  I feel like I've changed so many things from StenEd.  I started with integrating endings, and that opened a whole can of worms and conflicts.  Now when I write, I’m always trying to remember to incorporate endings, or remember which ones I can’t do, and especially now that I read about the ones I can’t incorporate on Phoenix, I’m worrying about that, too.

     When I got the Magnum Steno book, I decided to put all the prefixes and suffixes in my dictionary, and that caused some conflicts, so I tried to change the way I write some things.  I never practiced them, though, so when I tested for Caption Masters, a few things came out wrong, and the instructor suggested that I add asterisks to all of my suffixes.  I didn’t really know what was or what should be a suffix though, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to try to figure out "is this actually a suffix, or just a second stroke" when I was writing, so I decided to add asterisks to all of my second strokes, but I didn’t really commit to it, and I just kind of do it when it comes naturally, but it’s still something that slows me down when I write.  Even though I should just do an asterisk on all of my second strokes, I always have that moment of hesitation where I wonder, "do I need one here or not?"

     Then I bought the Broadcast Captioning Training Manual from NJCaptions, and I decided to add all the prefixes and suffixes that were listed in it to my dictionary, and that caused all kinds of conflicts and problems and things I had to come up with alternate ways of writing in order to fix.  I started using DL- at the start of my suffixes, because there were times when the outline for the suffix by itself was a regular word, and I needed to use that same outline as a prefix and a suffix, so I put the asterisk in the prefix, and then I didn’t have any way to distinguish the suffix, so, DL- worked great.  But I didn’t want to have to remember which ones needed DL and which ones didn’t, so where possible, I just created all of them with DL-.  So that’s another thing I have to think about; remembering the DL, and all the other things like it that I added.

     That’s basically the extent of it, but I feel like it’s really hurting my speed.  It seems like every time I hear a word, I experience massive hesistation where I have to think, "how am I supposed to write that now?" It’s all for the better because my writing will be truly conflict free, unlike it was with just the StenEd, where, for instance, the outline for the word con, and for words starting with con and for words ending with con were all the same.  But I almost feel like I’ve created this mutant theory, and I need to go back to square one and go back through my theory book and start completely over and do it all again, spend six months writing through all the exercises and word lists and train myself to write the way I want to now.

     I don’t have time for that kind of thing though, not unless I stop speedbuilding, and I certainly don’t want to do that.  I think, though, before I start going through my dictionary wholesale and trying to fix everything to at least translate properly when I remember to write it the way I want to, I’m going to work through the VITAC book, since I’m probably going to change even more things as I do that.  It talks about what is and what isn't a suffix, and has ways to fix basically all the conflicts.  I wish I had started with it and only changed things based on it to begin with.

     In other news, I got my minute today.  I don’t feel too much accomplishment about that though, because it was only at 215.  That’s the annoying thing about Realtime Coach.  Even though it says a piece is at a certain speed, it’s really not.  It’s all over the map.  It could start faster than it says it is, and then get slower than it says it is, and then be at the right speed for a minute.  It’s crazy.  I decided to just ignore that and practice the ones that say they’re the speed I want, though.

5.18

     I ordered the VITAC book.  I had the bright idea to e-mail VITAC directly and see if they knew where I could get one, and someone e-mailed me back the next day saying I could call and order from them.  It’s a good thing I had poked around the VITAC site a bit, because the e-mail simply came from the author of the book and had no subject!  I discovered this morning that there are actually still three seats open in the Caption Masters class.  I guess the other display was an error.  So I might still be able to take that in July, and all the information in the VITAC book might be discussed in the class, but that’s all right.  You can never have too many steno books, I guess. 

     Yesterday I was on depoman searching for posts about something or other, and I came across the suggestion that one should add dictionary entries from the machine to practice fingerspelling.  And it’s a useful thing to be able to do, anyway.  So I spent a good hour yesterday getting that all set up.  I’m still trying to figure out my alphabets, though.  I need to have a way to fingerspell in capital and lowercase in realtime and in the global window, so that’s four alphabets.  I spent some time on it today and I think I have it worked out.

     I got my two minutes together today, and I also managed to stack three words, although not on that final take.  "Here and staying" came out as STKPHAOEURG.  I got to record a drill exercise at 120, which is better than I’ve done for the past 2 days,  but I also had to record one at 50.  Apparently, I have a really, really hard time with "fr-" words, which is weird because FR is my brief for from, which I write all the time.

     It’s really fun to be able to do things from the machine.  After every take, I go back and write any mis-strokes five times, along with the words before and after them.  It was always a hassle to take my hands off the machine to scroll down through the take, but now I don’t have to!  

5.15

     I got my minute today!  I practiced writing it for about half an hour, and then on the very last runthrough before I was going to take a break, I decided to loosen up a little and not be so strict about accuracy, and I got it at 250 wpm (at the end, anyway) and 96% accuracy!  It took me exactly a week, which isn’t bad at all.  I think it was easier material than the rest of the piece has been, though.

     I realized that I really like writing to a metronome.  It’s almost calming, knowing that everything is going to happen at exactly the same speed.  I also like how there’s not really any pressure, at least not right now when I’m just seeing what my top speed is on all the exercises.  Yesterday my average speed actually went up from 125 to 129, but today it went back down to 127.  I had to record something at 75 wpm, which is insanely slow.  It had to do with PL-, which I’m apparently very bad at. “Fruit” was thrown in, too, though, and I guess all of those PL- words with an FR- word in the middle really threw me off. I think I have problems with F- in general.

     The Phoenix book talks about how important keyboard position is, so you’re able to reach all the keys easily.  I decided to try lowering my machine a bit.  I use the plastic case it came in as a lap desk, so to lower it, I opened the case and started writing on just the thicker half.  It looks weird and I don’t know if I could do it if I had a desk in front of my legs, but it seems to feel a lot better.  I should probably buy a real lap desk, but I like the idea of not having to bring it with me or spend money on it.

     I think the new position has helped, though, because ever since I got the LS, I’ve had to actually put my fingers on the home row to figure out where the machine is every time I take my hands off it, which I never had to do with the SRT. I had to define 150 null strokes because I would of course never hit the home row, but it would still help me know where I was.  I created my last one on the 6^th.  I can’t really be sure if I’m using the null strokes less, but it seems like I am.

     I don’t know if it was inspired by the Phoenix book or not, but I also decided to file my nails extremely short.  I always kept them short to help me write, but I was never truly writing with my fingertips like you’re supposed to.  I filed them down yesterday after my practice, as low as I could go without hurting myself.  They look really pathetic now and it’s actually rather depressing.  I like writing with them short, though.  It feels like being barefoot.  I can feel the keys a lot better.  I’d like to say that’s why I got my minute today, but I don’t think that was it.  I’ve been feeling more confident about it for the past couple of days, and I think I was successful in focusing on being slow and accurate with this minute.

     I started incorporating endings into my root words about nine months ago.  I went crazy with it and added everything you could.  It turns out that it wasn’t quicker for me to write that way, at least not right now, so I’ve backed off of some of it.  I added -L as an option for –l and –ly, but it created this problem where it would suggest it for both things on the same word, and I just now got around to taking it out of the integral prefixes and suffixes option.  I went ahead and added it as an option with an asterisk, although sometimes I do write it without one, like SLOEL for slowly.  I always get things like that popping up as suggestions, and I’ve started declining them when I think I won’t use them, to leave them open for Translation Magic to do something else with.  I wonder if I should just take them out of the table altogether?

     I found out yesterday that all the spots for the Caption Masters program in July are full.  I was going to re-test at some point before July, and I checked the status every day, and it magically went from three seats open to none, so I guess they weren’t updating it, because I doubt all three filled up in the same day.  That kind of pulled the rug out from under me, but maybe I can change the way I practice on my own.  I want to get a copy of the VITAC book because it deals with how to change your writing and your dictionary to get ready for realtime, and that’s definitely something I’ve been trying to work on (and struggling with) recently.  The only problem is you can’t buy the book anywhere!

Present Day

     I just got the Phoenix Fast Track to Machine Shorthand Speed book.  A couple of days ago, I spent some time reading through the introduction.  I agree with a lot of the principles and ideas, even though I learned StenEd writing theory, not Phoenix.  The author, Carol, talks about how important it is to have accuracy before speed so that you can build your muscle memory and rely on your fingers to write strokes accurately without having to consciously tell your fingers where to go.  I don't agree with Mark's strategy of getting something down for every word no matter how unreadable it is.  Like Carol says, when you do that, you're just training yourself to write things incorrectly.  You have to write them properly to build muscle memory.

     Carol also advises "trailing," or staying about four words behind the speaker so you can pick up on phrases you might have briefs for, and also so you can keep a steady rhythm.  She says students often incorrectly have bursts of high speed and then slow down.  I've noticed myself that I have that problem.  I write fast when I can, and then it throws everything else off, even though I try to keep a steady rhythm.  It's so hard not to try to keep up with the speaker and write as fast as I can, or to take advantage of places where I can speed up.  It's really interesting that Carol says the exact opposite thing that Mark does.  Mark says, "write fast, faster than you can, and accuracy at lower speeds will follow."  Carol says that speed is a natural outcome of accuracy, but accuracy is not a natural result of increased speed.

     That's how I've always felt.  I can't just write things as fast as I can, or it all comes out as slop, and I've always felt there wasn't any point in teaching myself to write slop.  I think Mark can do that because he's more of a court reporter.  I know he does, or has done, captioning, too, but I also know that out of all 5 years of results of the NCRA Realtime Contest that are listed on their website, he hasn't won a single one.  He usually finishes around 5th or 7th, although he did tie for first in one literary portion of the contest.

     The purpose of the Phoenix book is to eliminate hesitation, and I think it's going to be very helpful for me.  You practice columns of similar words, with unrelated words interspersed throughout so you can work on transitions, writing each word to the beat of a metronome.  I used that strategy before in school when the professor gave us a list of the thousand most frequently used words and had us practice them that way.  It did seem to help a bit with speed, and of course I got better at writing those words.  I'm excited to start improving my speeds on the words in the book, but there are 107 single-stroke exercises to go through.

     The first day I spent a lot of time on it and made it through the first nine exercises, but the second day I only got through five.  The book says to spend half an hour a day on it, but I don't have that kind of practice time, and Erik from depoman says 10-15 minutes a day is good, so I'm going to go with that.  In 10 minutes today, I only made it through two of the exercises.  At that rate, it would take me a month and half just to figure out what speed to start at on these exercises, and which ones I need to work on the most.  Maybe I'll have some extra time for it sometime.

     After the first day, I averaged all of my top speeds, and it was about 155.  I don't get to write a speed down unless I got that exercise with 100% accuracy.  Basically, I guess that means my realtime speed on new material is 155.  I knew that already, though.  I figured it was at about 160.  That sucks.  It makes me feel like I'm never going to get to 225, not any time soon, anyway.  This will be a good gauge for where it is, though, since I don't take tests, so I'm excited to see that start improving, too.

     I took the test to get into Caption Masters program, in January I think it was, and one of the suggestions the instructor had was that I add asterisks to all of my prefixes and suffixes.  That's great idea, but it makes me also want to add asterisks to word parts that aren't really suffixes, like the "mers" in "customers."  So I basically have to go through and re-define all 92,000 entries in my dictionary.  I'm trying to fix things as they come up, but unfortunately, when something like "-ry" comes up, and there's 1,000 entries I have to fix, it takes me a while to do it, and then all these other things like "-mon" come up and I just have this massive list that I feel like I'm never going to get to, and I use about half an hour of my practice time a day on it, when I should probably be actually practicing, but I don't have time for everything.

     Yesterday, instead of working on that, I decided to investigate the phonetics table.  I thought I would have to add a bunch of things to make it work, but I couldn't really think of anything I do fundamentally different from the StenEd theory, so I just tried to add a few helpful things that I tuck now, and then I turned on Translation Magic.  I had tried it a while ago, and it never really got anything right, so I turned it off until I could fiddle with it.  Today was the first time I did my speedbuilding practice with it turned on, and I love it!  I haven't had it come up with anything that I needed to alter my table for.  It doesn't always know what I was trying to write, but about 90% of the time it does.  The biggest problem I have is that it doesn't really catch things that I have briefs for, that I've misstroked.  But I guess you can't expect to to know about those, because they don't really follow the to phonetics rules.

     When I do my speedbuilding, I take a piece at 230 wpm, and I try to get it one minute at a time at speed.  I practice the minute until I can write it at 95% accuracy, and then move on to the next minute, and then I write both minutes together at 95% accuracy, then move on to the third minute.  It takes forever to go through a piece that way.  Maybe too long.  Maybe I should knock it back down a speed.  But I was getting things at 214 really easily, so I don't know.

     I've been working on this particular piece since March 27th, and I just started on the third minute today.  I'm focusing especially hard this time on writing everything slowly and accurately, without trying to keep up with the speaker.  I want to get my accuracy down pat and establish a rhythm.  I got up to 187 wpm on it today. I think it took me two weeks for the first minute, three weeks for the third, and one week to get them both, so we'll see what kind of progress I can make, if I can keep up with this strategy.

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 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.