First Quarter

I've been doing a lot more business CART now that I'm working for a new company. I get to cover lots of meetings, mostly about the status of various projects. It's really tough, because I never know what anyone's talking about. Every job is about a different topic with different speakers, and sometimes the meeting only lasts for 15 minutes, so I barely have time to get into any sort of rhythm.

One of my classes is cultural anthropology. The teacher uses a lot of what I like to call "$10 words"; one that sticks out is "tutelage." There's all kinds of weird terms, like patrilineal, matrilateral, Ju'/hoansi, ethnography, you name it. The teacher only talks at about 160 wpm, but it's tough keeping up with all the weird stuff that's not in my dictionary, or at least not in there the way I want to write it. It's kind of fun though to fingerspell something and then look over at the Auto-brief window and see if it was already in my dictionary or not. AB shows me a suggestion for the word in one place if it's already in there as something, and in a different place if it's not.

I don't have to edit the transcripts at all for this company (most of the time I don't even have to send one in), which is pretty cool. I still go through them for myself and identify problems/add words to my dictionary, though. I also run them through a Microsoft Word spellcheck when I'm all done fixing things, and I usually catch one or two more things I can change in my dictionary that way.

I was concerned that when I need to fingerspell something, I don't necessarily remember after the event is over that I had to fingerspell it, so it will never get in my dictionary. I couldn't find anything that would really help me search a tript for fingerspelling, so I came up with my own way of doing it. I go through the whole tript and find every instance of the stroke A* (which is my &A), and check for words I need to enter. Then I go through again and check for E* (which is &E). I figure most words probably had an A and/or an E in them, and call it good. I find a lot of first/last names that way.

I was actually getting backed up on transcripts that I needed to go back and look at for a couple weeks. If I had a repeat job for the same class/person, I would edit the transcript before that repeat job, but so many of them were just one-offs that I never had time to edit. I finally got them all cleared out today, though. It seemed like an impossible dream, but somehow it happened!

I'm kind of interested to get into captioning and hopefully have some commercial breaks. CART ends early a lot of the time (never during my anthropology class, unfortunately), but it can be non-stop writing for hours. It's really tough on my arm when I have to do that. If I could get in a few commercial breaks, I think it would help a lot with the pain.

Step Back

I don't know why stenography has to be such a two steps forward, one step back kind of deal. Every time I think I'm getting somewhere, there's a setback. I felt like I was making real progress with my realtime. I was becoming more aware of what I wrote as I was writing it. FREX, I wrote "BLOGD," and it didn't tran, so I wrote BLOG/D, easy as pie, during realtime. I felt like I was understanding better, as I wrote, why things weren't translating them, and I was getting better at fixing them without getting tripped up.

I had the opportunity to go sit in with a captioner, and she reviewed a half-hour file I did of the local news. She pointed out something that I saw when I was looking over the file myself. Since I learned to start dashing for corrections, and not counting it as an error if I dashed, I would often write things like "An air ryaner crashed in Baltimore today -- liner. Five people were killed." And I wouldn't count it as an error. But in reading that particular file, I realized that doesn't really help. It's completely out of context, and I should count it as an error.

She also said I needed to pick my speed up just a bit, and not drop quite as many sentences. I can agree with that. But when I try to force myself to go fast, I just get nervous and I make tons of mistakes, that I then try to fix, and then I'm even more behind, and it's a huge mess. I haven't ever been able to force myself to go faster that way.

I spent about a week trying to do it anyway, combined with trying to write (or re-write) more words around my corrections to give them context. I also practiced letting errors go more without trying to fix them, if I wasn't going to have time to give them context, or if I was going to drop a lot trying to make the correction. My accuracy tanked. For about another week, I tried to go back to my old style - more "smart" writing and telling myself I only had to get the important stuff, even though I'd wind up getting most of it. It didn't work. I still felt nervous about it, and my accuracy still sucked.

I started having problems getting into the groove of writing. I felt like my hands would go fast, no problem, but they kept stroking the wrong things. I even started stacking things I'd never stacked before! Ugh. I finally had one good day yesterday. I barely dropped anything at all, and nothing that was important. I had context around all of my corrections. My accuracy was 98.79%.

I'm not going to be able to find out if that particular streak would continue, because for the next two weeks I'm going to switch to metered verbatim practice for the CBC/CCP. Which we have to bring a printer for. Kind of silly, I think. I wonder if anyone ever gets together and says, "You bring the printer, and we'll all use it, and give you a few bucks for your trouble?"

I'm still forging on ahead, but I feel like I'm right back to square one again, feeling like I haven't made any progress in who knows how long. It's got to be there, though. Someone used to tell me, "When you used to be able to do something, and you can't anymore, that's just your body changing and evolving. It means you'll be able to do it soon again, better than before." It's a nice thing to pretend is true, whether it is or not.

Practice and Theory

I'm still having major problems with my dictionary. So many conflicts are caused by the StenEd theory. I'm still working to get an asterisk in every word ending that's also a standalone word - Nate, Kate, date, nation, etc. It really helps to see my mistakes live as I make them, though. Previously, after every take I would go through and check my mistakes, and make note of words I wanted to practice. But it's different when you're trying to write "live" and you actually see the mistake come up. It has much more of an effect, and I'm more likely to remember next time I write it that I need to write it differently, because I don't want that mistake to happen again.

I'm also writing a larger volume of material now, because I only write a show once and move on. I don't repeat the same show over and over for weeks, or even twice. Seeing just how many words are coming up incorrectly solely because they're not in my dictionary the way I want to write them has made me feel like I need to just go through the whole dictionary and re-write every word to make sure it's going to come out right. I keep a record every show of how many of those "wrote it right but it wasn't in my dictionary that way" words there are, and after 32 shows, I've got an average of .32% right now. It's not horrendous, but it seems like it should be a lot closer to zero.

I've been at the process of re-writing all the words in my dictionary for about 6 weeks now, and I've made it through 7,000 entries. Only a year left to go before it's done at that rate!

I've developed an entirely new theory on defining conflicts. I now define a lot of misstrokes as conflicts. I figure, if it was only going to be defined as "fun" before, what's the harm in having the AI choose between "fun" and "gun" since what I wrote wasn't the correct outline for anything, let alone "fun" or "gun," in the first place?

I am staying away from defining correct outlines as conflicts, though, and trying to come up with different ways of writing things instead. I occasionally stack "N" and "A," like with "taken a," so I'm trying to write "A*N" for "an," but it's not sticking at all. I even write five sentences every day with "an" in them, and most of the time I can remember the asterisk when I write the sentences, but it's been months, and I haven't written it properly once during the news.

Instead of my old practice of going through a take and re-writing each incorrect word five times (that took forever), now I just try to remember as I go through and count errors/make dictionary entries, to also think about whether or not I need to practice that word more. If I do, I add it to a list. I have a list of 58 words I write five times each at the beginning of each practice session. I keep a record of when I added them to that list, and make sure I write them for at least five sessions before I take them off, although I often leave them on for longer. As words get deleted from that list, I add new ones that I found while writing the news.

There are all sorts of words on the list, from names that were hard to write (Ezekiel Emanuel) and new ways of trying to write things (MEN/TO*R, since TOR is a beginning for words like "torment"), to old ways of writing things that I still haven't quite gotten the hang of (EN/M*I so words like it won't conflict with "my"). It seems like an insurmountable task right now to get everything squared away in my dictionary and in my memory, but I guess I'll get there someday if I keep plugging away at it.

I'm still practicing two drills in the Phoenix book at the beginning of every practice session, and my average wpm on all of them is up to 178.5. It's been stuck there for a few weeks for some reason. I think having that cushion to drop words during the news (which I only do when I have to, of course) might be interfering with what little speedbuilding rhythm I had going. Whenever I get discouraged with it, though, I can look back to when I started using the book a year and a half ago, and my average was only 115 wpm. I am improving, whether it seems like it or not.

In support of my theory that I need to re-write all the words in my dictionary, is one particular word: Demetrius. I had it defined 15 different ways, and not one of them was the way I would write it today. I was originally going to identify word groups that I write differently, such as words that end in "cy" or "gy," and re-write only those groups as I identified them. I realized, though, that the problem was much larger than that. Before that, though, I fixed 60 "-cy" entries, 260 for "-gy," and 160 for "-ta," which I now write with an asterisk.

I also had about 1,000 entries ending in "ly" that I had defined with a tucked -L, but that I would never write. Those were causing lots of problems when I misstroked the -L in a word, so I spent some time getting rid of them. And I finally fixed my "di-" so it wasn't the same as my "-dy," but darned if I can remember to write it that way yet.

Finally, another big list of all the word endings I went through and added asterisks to: –rat, -lator, -seen, -lent, -tor, -clear, -tha, -sell, -cell, -mist, -gan, -trick,  -dance, -phone, ax-, -con, -YOU, -el, -tel, -tal, -don, -lop, -ger, -yam, -mat, –ture, -tin, -ten, -ron, -ster, -band, -kate, -nate, -yum, -date, -late, -tize, and -ual (yule).

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.

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.