CBC Strike Three

I went into this test with a more chill attitude. I did great on all my practice takes. I did about 10, and I got them all on my first try with 96% or better accuracy. I wasn't super rushed leaving the apartment, or getting set up. I was the first one there last time, but about three people beat me in this time.

I didn't practice any of my words this time; I didn't have time. There was practice material playing the whole time, so I tried it out, but I didn't do very well on any of it. The words for the test were super easy this time. I think last time it was something like Harley, and some other weird stuff, but this time it was just William, piano, Canada, and Hawaii. Hawaii is super easy for me to write. Canada's fine, so I decided it would only trip me up to write a brief for it. William trips me up sometimes (I'm supposed to put an asterisk in the YAM part), and so does piano, so I made an easy brief for both of those.

I didn't really feel comfortable with my writing at any point. I was super nervous during the 1-minute warm up. I tried to just be relaxed and calm. My mouth gets really tense when I get to tricky parts to write, and it was tensing up right away, so I tried to just relax it. That seemed to help a little. I just got like a deer in the headlights again. My hands wouldn't do what I wanted them to, and the more I tried to force it, the stiffer they got. I managed to keep going, but it wasn't good writing.

I couldn't stop thinking about things, and being upset that I had blown it already and it wasn't working. My fourth minute was great for some reason. I calmed down and wrote everything perfectly. It just kept going on forever, and I psyched myself out, and made some mistakes in the last minute. I didn't pass. Maybe next time. I forgot to use my brief for William, and then remembered, and screwed myself up by deleting "will" and writing my brief. I wrote "C*AN" for Canada instead of "CAN/D*A," so that cost me two points, since "C*AN" comes out as ^can.

It wasn't a hard test. The words were easy, the speed was slow. Easiest test you'll ever fail, for sure. It sucks that I have to wait until November to take it again. Doing it twice a year makes the pressure way worse. I don't know why they only let us have one take. Even if they would do 15 minutes of audio and pick a random 5-minute sample to grade, it would be better.

I got to do the CBC first this time, instead of having to listen to the CRR first. I liked that better, but then it was really boring sitting and waiting for the CRR to finish. I don't like that I have to send a SASE with my flash drive. I think I pay enough for the test that they could send it back to me for free.

Failing the CBC sucks. It's such a huge disappointment, especially when you know there's no reason you shouldn't have passed it. I might try watching the screen next time. I thought it would throw me off, and I would get freaked out when I saw mistakes, but it's really weird not watching it. Maybe if I had the usual distraction of reading as I write, my mind wouldn't be so free to freak out. I'll try it out when I start practicing in October and see how it goes.

I'd kind of like to sit for the state court reporter exam, just so I have some kind of certification. It's two 7-minute QA takes at 200 wpm. You transcribe whichever one you want, and they grade a random 5-minute part of it. It's so totally different from captioning/CART, though, and I don't have any practice material. I hate RTC. The material is so dense. Even at 180 wpm it takes me like 6 times to get 96% on a take. I want some nice, normal stuff to practice. It's also hard to rationalize sitting for, because it's in October, and the CBC is in November. I know I can pass the CBC, so it's hard to take the CR exam when I'm just about to, theoretically, pass the CBC.

11.11

     I got my new minute already. I really liked the strategy of starting at a slower speed. I think what worked for me was telling myself I wasn't allowed to move on until I was "comfortable" writing it, as opposed to just shooting for 95% accuracy. The minute was also only at 220 wpm, which is the speed RTC claims the entire piece is, and the speed at which I actually want to practice.
     I decided to try getting a tripod for the LS, and today was the first time I used it. It was actually really nice not having to balance anything on my lap. It felt much more sturdy that way, and I think it's going to work out.
     I have another list of potential word-boundary conflicts: cast, going, grade, heart, ward, stream, wind, bridge, found, wax, bound, rail, nail, comb, fill, hole, room, pile, mill, fare, house, made, and bulb. And there were a few words that only presented problems in one instance: printwheel, standstill, and handshake. I can't believe anyone would have STAND\STIL defined as one word! There were a lot of instances for "-house" and "-room" especially. I also changed "board" to BAORD a while ago, but I never went back and put asterisks in for "-board" or even fixed all instances of BORD, apparently, so I took care of that.
     When I got to "-nk" in the Phoenix drills, I realized I never practiced doing FRNG instead of *NG. I started trying to think of the finger formation as "-nk" instead of thinking of words as, for example, DRAFRNG. That's what you're always supposed to do, but there are a lot of instances where I never quite got there. PB I think of as N, of course, and TK as D, etc., but for a lot of the other stuff, like IFM for "-ism," I'm still thinking "IFM." "-nk" words were dramatically easier to stroke once I started thinking of the position instead of the keys, so hopefully I can apply that to other aspects as well.

11.6

     I finally got the two minutes together that I was working on. It only took me 7 weeks. Way longer than it should have, but I just can't get the positioning right. It's like when you type on someone else's keyboard. On your keyboard, you can type 100 wpm. On an unfamiliar keyboard, suddenly you're knocked down to 60. I feel like I've been writing on someone else's steno machine for the past 8 months, and it hasn't gotten any more familiar than it was on the very first day.
     I decided to go back to my old teacher's strategy of speedbuilding: learn the minute at a slow speed, then bump it up a speed until you're comfortable with that, and then bump it up one last time to your goal speed. I don't know what kind of progress I'll make with that strategy, but for now I'm liking writing at 180 wpm.
     I'm down to 8,440 entries with "B" in them that might need inflected endings added. I figured out a lot of ways to weed out things that weren't verbs, like looking at words that end in "y" or "s" or whatnot. I've also continued finding word parts that need to be asterisked: bone, stroke, nose, son, late, lock, hand, time, foot, wear, print, note, step, land, head, walk, and hold.
     I ran into particularly tedious problems with "out-" and "sub-". The old StenEd "out-" is O*UT, which is my "-out," so I had to move the asterisks in those outlines from the first stroke to the second one. I don't like the idea of "sub" and "sub-" being the same outline, so I had to add an asterisk to all the strokes that come after "sub-" (or at least the ones that are words on their own), like "submarine" and whatnot.

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.

9.6

     Not much to report today, at least in terms of improvement. I feel like I might finally be getting somewhere with the Report-It, but I'm not there yet. The minute I'm working on is so ridiculously difficult. I can't believe it's only at 230 wpm. I routinely write it at 214 or 250, and I regularly hit 300 at the end, too. I've never had 300 come up with any sort of regularity before, so I must be doing something right.

     A couple times, I've managed to write "poultry was raping-free." I guess I should take raping out of the dictionary; no one wants to see that come up the next time someone says "range." I'm about to spend a week training myself to use the STK- for Z rather than S*, and I've apparently written the word "zoom" 508 times.

8.21

     I finally got to the point where I can do all of the single-stroke drills at at least 100 wpm! And it only took me 9 weeks. Okay, so that's kind of sad. My average on the drills is now 130. It was 115 when I started, so I guess that's good.
   I also got my new minute today. It took me almost two weeks, but it was at 250. I got up to 260 at the end of it once. My next minute is at 230, but it doesn't seem any slower.

8.11

     I finished my whole entire piece on Tuesday.  It only took five weeks, which is good, and much better than the 14 weeks I spent on the one before it.  Unfortunately, it was the last one that RTC labeled as 220 wpm, so now I have to move up to 225.  That wouldn’t be so bad except that the first piece at "225" is actually 250 wpm for the first minute. :(   

     I’ve been working on it for a couple of days, and I’m not ready to give up yet, but it’s definitely difficult.  I actually hit 214 at the end of it today.  I misstroked "windowsills," and what I actually wrote was "vindowsills." TM translated it to "veindo Simms."

8.8

     Lots of things have happened since I updated last.  I got a new job, which I like lot better, and that kind of takes the pressure off of getting done with "school" as soon as possible.  My boyfriend of six years broke up with me a week ago, but I didn’t take a single second off from homework.  I think it actually helped me focus a little bit.  I also didn’t care about much of anything for a few days, so I wasn’t stressed out about trying to get everything perfect when I was writing.

     I got the 2 minutes together that I was working on last Saturday, at 97.8% accuracy, and 250 wpm at the end.  I was also going at 250 wpm when I got the next minute last Wednesday (I just barely got it – 95.01% accuracy). That one only went so quickly because it was at about 210 wpm, though.  Now all I have left to finish the piece is the last 2 minutes together!

     Unfortunately, because of scheduling with my new job, I had to take 2 days off in a row.  I used to take a day off once a week, and I haven’t been doing that for about seven months.  Now I get to go back to it, which is great, but this particular set of weeks, the days had to be next to each other, and that didn’t help at all.

     I feel like I spend 95% of my practice time writing in a position where I can’t properly reach the keys, and then, that one magical moment when I manage to get in the right position is when I get my minutes.  I guess I’ll figure it out eventually.  I discovered that slog, spake, and slub weren’t in my dictionary.  I also got "boric flay" out of trying to write "work and play," which was interesting.

7.24

     I made it through three sections of the VITAC book in one day.  One was about homephones, which I pretty much had worked out already from StenEd.  The next was prefixes and suffixes, and luckily there aren’t that many in the VITAC book.    I did skip a few, and there are a few I still need to learn.  I spent most of the time in that section on the "medical and technical" ones.  The last section was 25 pages of words that might create conflicts.  Going through that wasn’t any fun at all.

     I think I might have found a good position for the BackJoy and the Report-It and everything.  It’s not perfect, so I’m still tweaking it, but maybe someday soon I won’t feel like I’m fighting to hit the right keys anymore.  I got my last minute on Wednesday, and I got that one and the one before it together yesterday at 96.5% accuracy.  The new minute doesn’t seem too hard, and it’s at 230 wpm.

7.13

     I got my two minutes together yesterday at 98% accuracy.  My new minute seems hard.  It’s at about 234 wpm.   At least if I ever run into a dictation that’s actually at 220 like it’s labeled, I’ll be ready.  I decided to create a job dictionary for the drill book.  I ran into one drill in particular that was full of words that aren’t actual words, like "tinct" and "junct" and "funct."  I didn’t like how they never translated, but I didn’t want them in my dictionary, either.

     I also had time to go through and delete all 500 entries I had where -TD was defined as -ted.  That must be acceptable somehow in StenEd, because I don’t think I added that many myself.  I hit the "D" too often when I'm only going for the "T," though, and I also had problems only hitting one or the other when I was trying to stroke both.

7.09

     Erik on depoman was talking about "quality" practice the other day, and he brought up a good point about being interested in your homework.  He said that as soon as you lose interest, you might as well not be practicing, because you're not learning anything anymore.  This week I've been focusing on focusing (har) and trying to make sure I don't ever go on "autopilot" when I'm doing any part of my practice.

     It seems to be paying off, because I already got the minute at 235 wpm.   I got it yesterday at 95.9% accuracy, and I was going at 260 wpm at the end.  My new minute is only at 208 wpm, but it has a lot of ages and numbers which are making it hard. I’ve already gotten up to 231 on it, though.  Thanks to the drill book, I also discovered that "smirk" wasn’t in my dictionary.

7.02

     I finally finished my piece!  I have been working on it for almost 14 weeks.  That seems a little excessive.  I got it at over 300 wpm and 96% accuracy. I start my speedbuilding every day by writing difficult words from the piece five times each.  I don't take those words off the list until I finish the piece.  I wound up with 53 words for this piece, and I decided I can write all but 16 of them well enough now.  I’ve really been looking forward to not having to write all of those anymore.
     You may remember that I came up with a great brief for "breast cancer" earlier in the piece. It turned out it wasn't so easy to stroke, but the misstrokes didn't conflict with anything, so I didn't worry about it. I now have 38 entries for it, and I wrote it the right way over 5,100 times. I wound up with a final total of 35 entries for mammogram, but I only wrote that 1,300 times.

     My new piece seems like it’s going to be really hard, or at least the first minute is.  There are a lot of names.  It’s also at 235 wpm.  I slowed it down to the next highest speed, and it was 211 wpm.  I don’t want to drop down that low, so I guess I’m just stuck with 235.  Today was my first day with it and I got up to 173 wpm.  I had to slow it down to 140 in order to write it perfectly, though.

     I figured out which drill I missed in the book.  I only had a few drills left to check after that one, so I just went ahead and finished them, and tomorrow I go back to the ones I was really bad at.  I’ve been working on a new strategy with the book, which is to kind of read ahead and get ready for the words that are coming up instead of just letting them be a surprise.  It seems to be working well.

6.29

     I almost got the last 2 minutes of my piece today.  I got them at 94.3% accuracy.  So close.  Thanks to the Phoenix drill book, I have Norge in my dictionary if it ever comes up.  Also, despite what Carol says, I’ve decided that it’s okay to tuck the "G" on words that end in "R."  The only example she gives of why it’s not okay is burg/burring, and really, I don’t think burring is going to come up enough for it to be a problem. I couldn't think of anything else where it has been or would be a problem, either, so I’m just going to go ahead and do it.  I already deleted anything I had like that, though.

6.25

     I got up to 300 wpm on my minute yesterday.  I had no idea I was going that fast, though.  It felt exactly the same as when I was only going at 175 wpm.  Today I got up to 300 twice, and one of those times was when I wrote the entire minute, at 95% accuracy!  It took me exactly one week to get it, which is about how long it’s supposed to take me to get a new minute at practice speed.  The minute had 223 words, too, so it’s not like it was a slow part of the piece or anything.

     I decided that now was the best time to go back and figure out which drill I missed.  For some reason I thought I couldn’t do the KN- drill, so I knew which one that was, and I noticed I was on the wrong number about 19 drills later, so that’s only 20 drills I have to do over again.  I’ve done eight so far, and I’ve improved on all of them, although not enough to help my average.  After a week of re-doing drills, I’ve only gone from 115 to 116.

6.22

     I got up to 250 on the new minute a few times today. With my current setup, I don't have anything under the LS - no case, no paper, nothing. I hope it stays that way when I get something permanent down. I felt like it was worth noting that when I do the Phoenix drills, anything I misstroke for the first time counts as a mistake, and I don't get to move on to the next speed. If it's already in my dictionary because I misstroked it last time, I don't count it as a misstroke. I decided today that if Translation Magic translates it properly even though it's a first-time misstroke, I'm not going to count that as a misstroke, either.

     I moved up to 60 wpm on SKW (from 45), and 70 WPM on SHR (from 50), which I was happy with. I was not happy that it took me over half an hour to do it, but I'm committing to doing two drills every day. After I made it through all 107 drills (actually, I somehow missed a couple somewhere before #66, and I have no idea which ones, so I need to figure that out someday), my average speed was exactly 115 wpm. It was down to 110 before I got to the "strength-building drills," so I was happy enough to see it go back up to 115. Now after re-doing 3 drills, it's up to 116. Not exactly impressive, but I'll get there.

6.21

     My new minute seems easy, but they always do. I got up to 214 at the end already, though. I wound up having to go down a speed on both of my drills today. One of them was SHR. StenEd says to do, for example, SH/RED for such things, but I picked up the idea of SWR from depoman. Of course, then I never actually learned it, so in order to write all five columns perfectly today, I had to drop down to 50 wpm. It felt good to get them at any speed, though.

     I more or less learned to do consonant + OE for suffixes, and consonant + O for prefixes. So "audio" would be AUD/YOE, and "audiophile" would be AUD/YO/FAOIL. Today I went through about 70 OE entries I had added asterisks to and got rid of the asterisks. The VITAC book suggests using STK for Z instead of S*, which I think is a great idea since I actually have had a few conflicts come up, with "s" words that I wanted to capitalize with an asterisk but couldn’t because that made a "z" word, and whatnot. As I was going through my O*E words, I changed a few "z" words, too. Then I changed all my "-zy" words to STKEU, and then I went ahead and just changed all the "z" words in the entire dictionary, which was only about 150.

     I don’t have the foggiest idea what "katzenjammer" means, but apparently I’ve got two ways to write it if it ever comes up.

6.20

     I’ve made things difficult for myself with the Report-It again. I realized that in the new position, I was focusing on keeping my shoulders down so I wouldn’t have tension in them. But that was a kind of tension, too, and I wasn’t completely relaxed in that position, either. So I needed to find a place to put the Report-It where my shoulders would be completely relaxed, and now that’s been driving me crazy again.

     You know how sometimes, your machine just isn’t quite in the right spot, and you have to slightly adjust your own positioning to account for it, and really fight to get down every word, because you can’t stop to move the machine? I’ve been writing every word like that for the past month. It’s going to be good when I get it right though, I know it is.

     I finally got something right today. It was a horrible day for practice. I spent the first 2 hours messing with the Report-It. I didn’t record how long I spent on the drill book, but it was a long time. I finally made it all the way through yesterday, and I also went back and re-did an exercise for the first time. Each day I’m going to do the two that I have the slowest currently recorded speeds for. My worst speed, which was only on one exercise thankfully (the FR one), was 50 wpm.

     Unfortunately, I couldn’t best that speed yesterday. But today, I doubled it! I got the words at 100 wpm. I decided that if I have a misstroke already defined in my dictionary, and I write the word that way, it counts as being correct. It doesn’t matter if I’m training myself to write it incorrectly as long as it translates and doesn’t conflict with anything. That took a long time though, writing all 65 words enough times to double the speed, and then I had to do my next-slowest exercise. SKW, 55 wpm. I couldn’t even do it at 55 though. I had to drop it down to 50.

     It was well past my normal homework time by the time I started speedbuilding in earnest (8 hours past, in fact) and I wasn’t expecting much out of it since I never really got the Report-It where I wanted it. But then, I wrote my piece (or at least the last two minutes, which is all I’m counting for accuracy) all the way through, and it was at 95% accuracy! After writing the same 4 minutes over and over for the past month, I finally get to move on to..the last minute on this piece!

     I know what you’re thinking: if you could write 2 minutes individually at 95% accuracy, and it took you a month to be able to write them together at 95% (with 2 minutes in front of them), maybe that speed is too high. But I maintain that it would’ve happened a lot faster if I hadn’t been struggling with the Report-It the entire time.

     StenEd teaches that "any" is NI and "-ny" is N*I. That’s a little weird, though. None of the other –y suffixes have asterisks, so why not just make "any" N*I or something? I was just going to leave it, even though the VITAC book says “-ny” should be NI, but I decided I’d rather go for consistency, so I changed all 176 dictionary entries that had the N*I. Now I have to learn to write "any" as NE. That’s what the book suggested, and I liked the idea of leaving N*I open for other things. I also found a few dozen entries that started with "OR," which I can’t have because that’s my stroke for the word "or," so I fixed those.

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.

6.10

     It’s really nice not to have to spend half of my practice time playing with the Report-It.  In all of the terrible positions I had it in, I couldn’t even write for 4 minutes without feeling horribly fatigued, and now at least from a fatigue standpoint, I’m completely back to normal.  I haven’t gotten used to the position yet, but I’m working on it.

       Today I measured the speed of my piece when I write it for control, at the end of my practice session. I’m almost completely comfortable writing it at that speed, and I don’t think I would want to go much faster.  It turns out that it’s only 180 wpm.  That seems awfully disappointing. I was also able to figure out how many words were in the 4 minutes that I write at the normal speed.  I know it starts out at 230 and finishes at 215.  According to RTC, it’s supposed to be 220, and actually, if you average all 4 minutes, it is 222.

     The other day I had time for some dictionary maintenance, so I finished fixing every thing I wanted to in terms of integrated endings.  I deleted 333 LG words, 122 NG words, and 46 RG words.  I also fixed anything where I had BG as in ribbing, because that conflicts with things like Rick, and anything were I had RBG, for things like crashing, because that conflicts with things like cracker.  Remembering not to write all of those is going to be a different story. 

     I deleted some entries with the long A sound and D, like swayed, which interferes with suede.  Carol says you shouldn’t attach D to any vowel sounds, but I think I’ve accounted for any problems aside from the long A. I also finally added my attaching alphabet, that attaches lowercase letters to the last word.