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!

Practice Strategy and Dilemma #1 Billion

Now that the CBC exam is over and I'm not doing metered speed takes anymore, I'm back to practicing to the news. My usual rotation of ABC World News, CBS Evening News, PBS NewsHour, and local Q13 Fox News. I think it's a good variety. Before the exam, I would write half an hour of a show, basically just "doing my best" in terms of watching the screen, accuracy, and completeness. Then I'd go back over it, record an accuracy score, and move on to 30 minutes of a different show the next day.

The strategy I've been trying out since the exam comes from the NJ Captions manual. I've been writing only the first 10 minutes of a show several times, focusing on a different aspect each time, like writing numbers. That's the easy part. I've found that the hard part is pushing myself in all the other areas. I tend to want to just slack off on everything else, since the manual says I should focus on the one specific area to the exclusion of all others. I don't think that's a great idea, though.

Even when I'm focusing on speed, I try to keep it under control a little bit. I let myself write whatever feels natural and I don't go back to correct anything, but I don't write utter slop just to get a stroke down for every word, either. I think it's important to keep at least some focus on every aspect. Especially when it comes to fingerspelling.

I could focus exclusively on the fingerspelling, and not worry about writing what was said after that word. That would be following the instructions literally. But what good does that do me? It's not fingerspelling I really need to work on, it's fingerspelling while retaining and writing what's said after that word.

It's a tough balance. I really can't decide if I should focus on each area exclusively, or just focus "more than usual" on it. If I really focus on only one aspect per take, and throw everything else to the wind, will my overall skill improve, or will I just lose all the "focus on all the balls in the air" skill that I've been focusing on building up for the past few months?

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.

9.18

     I finally finished the VITAC book..sort of, anyway. I still have a few things in my dictionary I need to clean up, but I decided they weren't the most important things to get done right now. It only took me about 11 hours, which isn't bad at all, except for the fact that it took me about 3 months to get through those 11 hours of work.

     I got up to acceptable accuracy on that ridiculously difficult minute a week ago, and I'm still working on the first two minutes of that piece together. I hit 324 today, which was pretty exciting. I'm feeling even better about the Report-It, quite possibly the best I've ever felt, in fact. I got there by consciously forcing myself to get into proper position every time I started to write. Now though, I'm starting to wonder if I'm just going for what feels right/easiest and letting my shoulders tense up, so I think I need to examine that next time I write.

     I've gotten all of my drills up to 110 or better, and my average speed on them is now 134 wpm. In dictionary maintenance, I decided all words like "forum" should be written with *UM to avoid conflicting with the word "um," so I changed all 133 instances of that. I'm not so sure about it now since it contradicts my plan to add asterisks to words and keep them out of final word parts, but it always seemed wrong to me to use UM, so I guess I'll just give it a try.

     The next thing on my to-do list is to go through the NJCaptions conflict-finding sentences. I started doing it before I got the VITAC book, and now I want to start again from the beginning. I made it all the way through the first page in one sitting. I discovered that in StenEd, TOR- and -TOR are both TOR, which doesn't work at all, so today I spent half an hour going through all 700 -TOR entries and changing them to TO*R. I only had 53 TOR- entries, but I'm trying to write all of my initial word parts without asterisks, since that's how I learned most of them.

Task List: July

• Delete all entries that include -TD for words like "edited"
• Do 8 sections of the VITAC book
• Re-do the NJCaptions list of prefixes and suffixes
• Write through the conflict-finding sentences on the Phoenix site
• Delete unused briefs from my dictionary
• Global words/note errors in broadcast transcripts

6.15

     I am starting to show some progress on my piece again, although I don’t really feel any better about it.  I'm consistently getting to 250 wpm at the end, and I have even hit six strokes per minute a couple of times.  Both times were when I was trying very hard to go as slowly and write as cleanly as possible.  It’s so weird how I always wind up going fastest when I’m trying to write the slowest, and I write the slowest when I’m trying to go faster.

     I had time for about two more hours of dictionary maintenance today. I started by going back to the suffixes.  The general consensus on depoman was that I should have as many prefixes and suffixes as I could use, but I decided that I hadn’t done all of that work in vain.  I finished weeding out all the suffixes that needed to keep their asterisks, like the ones that are just words like "woods,"  and also ones that included –th and –v. I put all of those back in my dictionary.  Then I deleted all of the suffixes that started with DL- that I made when I went through the NJCaptions list.

     Then, I went through all 780 suffixes that were left and took the asterisks out of them.  Then I had about 800 suffixes that needed to be reintroduced into my dictionary, now sans asterisks.  As I put them back in, if there were any conflicts I mostly just didn’t enter the suffix.  I know a lot of them came from Mark’s dictionary, and those aren’t exactly vital for me to have.
     My plan now is that after I go through the VITAC book, I’ll go back through the NJCaptions list again and make suffixes and prefixes again, because I’ll probably want to make them differently than the first time around.  After I’ve done that I’ll have to go through the big list of conflict-finding sentences on the Phoenix site.

     After that I went through my dictionary and found all of the words that start with RI or TI or anything like that and either changed them or got rid of them.  The one problem I didn’t fix was that fact that StenEd teaches that DI should be used for di- and –dy, which doesn’t seem like a good idea.  But I’m not going to worry about that for now.

     Then I discovered that I don’t have to worry about the next four concepts in the VITAC book, because they’re already accounted for in my theory.  The last concept halfway was.  Since I use EN to start words, I’m not supposed to use it in the middle of words, but I do, so I had to go through about 250 entries that were in my dictionary and either delete them because I wouldn’t write them that way anyway, or change the EN to just N.
     The next thing I had to fix was the fact that I both started and ended words with EL, so I had to fix/delete 113 entries for that. I didn't have to worry about the next concept, but the last one in the "word boundary errors" section is a doozy. The book says to use ER for -er and -or, and to that end, gives you a list of 268 -or words that you should make sure translate properly in your dictionary. Based on how I break up words, it turns out most of these would involve a tucked R - activator, for example, is just ACT/VAIRT.
      Now that I think about it, actually, I'll probably just come back to the list another time. I want to go through the book and figure out what things I need to change in my writing before I go back to just dictionary-building. So that's the first section of the book "done." It took me 6 hours, and I still have 8 sections left.

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.