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!

StenEd: Y U No Be Conflict-Free?

     I've hit a major roadblock in my speedbuilding, and it's really starting to become aggravating. I haven't made any progress in a whole year. I'm supposed to have been "graduated" by now! Ugh. All I can do is keep plugging away at it, I guess. I don't know what the big problem is with this 2-minute section, though. It's really starting to lose all meaning at this point.

     I did finally accomplish something, though: I made it through the list of conflict-finding sentences! At first I was just going through it and if the sentence didn't produce a conflict, I moved on. But sometimes that was just because of a particular brief I had. So I took a closer look at what the sentence was trying to show me (that you shouldn't have the same outline for PER-, -PER and PER, for example) and made sure I wouldn't have any conflicts in any situation, not just the one presented by the sentence.

     I discovered a lot of flaws in my own personal theory, and in StenEd, the above example being one of them. At the end of the exercise, I had a problem with: -con, -ran, -less, -fin, -den, -mine, -lean, -net, -lent, -rise, -set, -let, -size, -sit, -stance, -ate, -wait, -pal, -lay, -nut, -plain, -lies, -man, -jer, -win, est-, -til, -mit, Ron-, and -ster. A lot of them are easy fixes, like adding an asterisk to the word part and leaving the actual words as they are, and I didn't have to change a huge amount of entries. However, there were some word parts that took more work. They were, with number of entries I had to fix: -tic/tic/tick (200), -cal/cal/-cal (345), ter/-ter (277), -rate (113), -ton (115), and -ship (92).

     Tick/tic/-tic was particularly problematic. TIK for tick, obviously, and T*IK for tic, but I couldn't do T-K for -tic because that's my "it can." So I went with T*K. The real problem is going to be remembering my resolutions for all of this stuff. Why couldn't StenEd have just actually been a conflict-free realtime theory, instead of being one "most of the time"?

     With all the stuff I had to fix, I was beginning to think I should've just left the asterisks in all of my ending word parts, because now I have to try to remember which ones have asterisks and which ones don't. I tried to delete the vowels or do something other than just add an asterisk to make it easier to remember.  Hopefully the number of ones I wound up just doing asterisks for is going to be small enough that I can learn them without inducing massive amounts of hesitation.

     I also spent about half an hour going through all of my capitalized entries and forcing literal case on names like "De Niro." I already had most of them done, but I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed any and it would all be consistent.

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.

5.13

     I am slowly making progress on my minute.  I can only tell how fast I’m going at the very end, but I was writing at 250 wpm once yesterday and once today.  I’m also sporadically getting to about 214 at the end now.  I finally decided to give up my brief for driver.  I’ve never really been able to write it well, and so now I’m just going to write DRAOIV/ER.  I think instead of dictionary maintenance, I’m going to finish getting through all 107 exercises in the Phoenix drill book.  So far I’ve made it through 30, and my speed is slowly falling, unfortunately.  It’s down to 126 now.  Last time I did any work with a metronome, my average speed was 104, but that had some multisyllabic words, so I guess I can’t really make a comparison.

     The biggest problem I’m having with the exercises in the drill book, besides not being able to go fast enough, is coming to a dead stop whenever I make a mistake.  You’re supposed to just keep going without erasing in order to keep a steady rhythm.  I’m working on the same thing during speedbuilding, too.  I might as well be stopping every time I feel myself make a mistake, because I have to write the word again once, twice, or even three times before I can keep writing, and by then I’ve missed quite a bit of audio.  I’d be much better off if I could just ignore it and keep going.  My accuracy wouldn’t suffer that much, either.  The problem I’ve had with trying to do that in the past is then I can’t focus on writing anything well and I just write slop.  I need to find a happy medium, where I try to write everything perfectly, but if I don’t, I just ignore it and keep going.

     I did get another cool thing from the Phoenix book.  They say to check your machine position, you should write “green glass, black and blue.”  I like that.  It works well for reassuring me that my machine is in the right place.  I have a terrible time with positioning, and it hasn’t gotten any better on the LS.  I always feel like I have to “search” for the keys, or like they’re not where I expect them to be.  I like to really press the keys and linger on them every time I hit to get a feeling for where I am, which is the totally wrong thing to do, but I’ve never gotten the hang of the “light touch.”  I was definitely a pounder on my SRT, and it completely threw me off when I tried to make the touch lighter on it.  I know I can write faster on the LS, I just don’t know if it helps me to go faster when my accuracy suffers.

     I hate how nothing translates properly anymore.  I’ve changed how I write so much from the StenEd that nothing is in my dictionary, it seems like.  It makes me feel like I haven’t made any progress, like I’ve only gone backwards and it’s going to take forever to go forwards.   I also put in ton of new suffixes and prefixes, but I haven’t learned any of them, so I never know how to write anything, and I always just write it the old way and it comes out wrong.  I need to actually learn those prefixes and suffixes or having them in my dictionary isn’t doing me any good.