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).

1.05.12

     It's been a while since I updated. I'm still liking the tripod with my LS. I'd like to move away from it and go to a lapdesk at some point, but that's down the road when I've perfected my positioning. I think I'm making progress on that front, but it's definitely not dialed in yet. I've been working on my sitting posture, starting with getting comfortable in the legs and back, and adjusting everything else from there, on a daily basis. The past couple of days it's worked out pretty well.

     I got probably about 3 minutes into my last piece, and then I was ready to try out a new strategy I've been planning to start for a while. I completely abandoned the speed "tapes." The VITAC book suggests recording national news and practicing to that, and that seems like a pretty solid strategy. I really need practice writing spontaneously, and it's great for practicing a variety of names and terms instead of the same ones for two months at a time.

     The book suggests breaking the episode up into each individual story. First you listen to it in its entirity, and write down/practice any words you think might trip you up. I always come up with an alarming number of them, way more than I feel like I should have at this point. I've tweaked my theory so much though, I just don't have any of it in my muscle memory at all. Which is why I'm also going back through my theory book. That's something I've been trying to do for a long time, but I let myself get sidetracked with dictionary maintenance.

     Speaking of which, I got a lot done there. I finished all of my P and B inflected endings, and did 2-3 other things that I don't remember anymore. I have yet more I need to do, but I'm going to try to do that during non-practice time.

     After you run through the story without writing anything, you write the introduction alone until you've got it perfect, then the story, then the follow-up. It's awesome not having people blazing along at a constant 250 wpm anymore! I don't pick it up nearly as fast as I should; sometimes it takes me 2-3 hours just to get a 3 minute segment. But hopefully, you can't go wrong practicing at real speeds.

     I'm up to at least 130 wpm on all of my Phoenix drills, with an average speed of 150. I've been using the drill book for 30 weeks so far. Only another 30 to go if I keep up at this rate..

     For those of you following along, perhaps in your own dictionaries, here are the rest of the possible word-boundary errors I've fixed.

Final word parts:

light, ground, long, box, fish, hound, fight, shot, saw, bag, book, cuff, cap, string, sick, strong, break, sight, knife, pot, sake, proof, seed, spring, hood, cure, night, week, stop, pick, suit, shop, coat, drop, sack, paper, track, bite, lash, pipe, place, berry, play, lance, piece, field, spread, bug, bird, port, pit, beat, wood, weight, word, guard, bed

Instances that only affected one word:

heartthrob, hedgehog, henpeck, hitchhike, hoodwink, inkblot, ironclad, jackhammer, landlord, livestock, mankind, nightclub, paycheck, pinstripe, shoptalk, skyrocket, smokestack, spendthrift, sunroof, wisecrack, carefree, shipshape, sideswipe, switchblade, bedfellow, bellhop, jailbait, kidnap, netherworld, nosebleed, postpaid, postscript, snowplow, stopgap, teacup, wastebasket, watchdog, waterspout, wiretap, shopworn

I discovered that I was writing "fore-" and "fore" the same way (thanks StenEd), but I don't think I'm going to fix it. I also had a lot of problems with words that start with "up" (uphold, uphill, etc) and "air" (aircraft, airstrike, etc).

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.

10.16

     I'm trying out something new with the Report-It: focusing on my wrists. Trying to make them straight instead of tilted down. So far I can either get into a position where my shoulders/arms are comfortable, or I can get into one where I can actually stroke the keys, but not both at the same time. Someday.

     I got all of my drill speeds up to 120, and my average drill speed is now 140. I also spent about two and a half hours going through my dictionary and deleting all the briefs for phrases that I didn't even know were in there, because I never learned them. They just came pre-loaded on the StenEd dictionary. I wound up deleting 2400 (or actually, moving them out of my dictionary into their own dictionary, since I'm trying to remember not to actually "delete" anything anymore).

     While I was doing that, I discovered some more things that could have been word boundary problems. I found some phrases like "bill folded" that made me wonder if BIL/FOELD was defined as "billfold," and, in fact, it was. I wound up fixing issues with -fold, -rest, -watch, and -end. I also realized I was using the same stroke for fer- and -fer, and in fixing that I also fixed -vent and -tile. I'm trying to remember to asterisk any word ending that's also a word on its own.

     My next big project is to go through all the entries in my dictionary that have B and/or P in them and add inflected endings to the verbs. Eclipse 5 has the awsome feature of automatically translating your integral prefixes and stuffixes, which is great except in the case of N. NG and ND cause way too many conflicts, so I don't want them to be automatically translated, which means I can't have BG/BD or PG/PD in the table, either, and I'll have to manually enter all of those.

     I've got 45k entries with B in them, and I only knocked out 4500 in my first go at it today, so I'm not going to be moving on anytime soon.

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.

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.

7.17

     I started going through my dictionary and trying to change all the initial "z"s from S* to STK.  The VITAC book says I should, and I’ve had some problems with the S*, so I decided I might as well.  As I was painstakingly updating 200 entries, I started to wonder how much I really needed words like "marbelization" in my dictionary.  I got through all of those, and then I decided to just look at all instances of "z" so I could catch everything that I needed to change, and I decided I should probably wait and make sure that change is going to "stick" before I spend all that time changing my dictionary.

     When I first started incorporating StenoMaster, I loved the idea of doing "–ss" as -S and "sses"/"ces" as -SZ.  But I eventually realized that my fingers aren't that accurate, and I have trouble writing SZ quickly, so I should probably just save that for special things I already learned it for, like "less" vs. "–less" and "miss" vs. "mis-". I just now went through and deleted all 194 entries that needed to be changed back.

     I decided a while ago that SWR- was a cool way to write "shr-" instead of SH/R, but of course I never did anything about it, so when that came up in the VITAC book, I went through and fixed all 94 entries of that.  The StenEd dictionary came with all of those words defined twice with the same outline, one with an asterisk and one without.  I have no idea why.

     I also decided to adopt the method of distinguishing between words like "cash" and "carb" by writing "carb" as CAURB a while ago.  Luckily there aren’t many words like that and I had fixed most of them already, but I went through and double-checked that list, too.

     The VITAC book doesn’t like the idea of writing words like "bask" in two strokes, which StenoMaster taught me to stop doing anyway, but I went through and made sure that all 74 words like that were now correct in my dictionary.  Most of them were, thanks to having come up in the "–sk" exercise in the Phoenix drill book.

     The VITAC book also introduced me to the idea of writing words like "drank" as DRAFRNG.  I’d probably noticed that on depoman before, but it just seemed weird.  I write it now as DRA*NG, but when I saw it in the book, I tried it out, and I realized it’s the same thing, you just don’t have to move your index finger over as far.  I guess it’s a better idea, because I always had a hard time with "-nk" words, anyway.  I decided not to change those entries yet though, since it’s another one that’s going to be a big project

     The book also says you should distinguish between "comp" and "ex", because StenEd says to use KP for both, which does create some conflicts.  I think I’ve got that mostly under control though, since I learned which ones to watch out for in theory class, so I’m just going to leave it.  The book says to use –GT for –TH so you can have *T open for proper nouns, but -GT would really mess up my words like "netting", so I’m not doing that, either.

     It says to use –FT for –ST for the same reason, but I think that would be too much of a change for me to worry about right now when it hasn’t been a problem yet anyway.  It also says to do –FRB for –V, but that’s really hard for me to stroke, so I’m not doing that, either.  And of course, the biggest  suggestion I’m ignoring is to not incorporate any endings.  I don’t see any reason to give that up.

     So I sort of finished another section of the book, by just about skipping half of the ideas and saving the other half for later.  I also discovered that "snooze" wasn’t in my dictionary.

     I got this BackJoy thing, and I kind of like it, and I think I’m going to keep it, but it changes my posture, so now I have to figure out all over again where to put the Report-It, and I’m not having much success yet, which means I’m not making much progress on this minute, which is also super fast.  I did get up to 250 wpm at the end of it today, though.

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.

Operation Delete All Asterisks

     I also had time to actually start on the VITAC book.  The very first thing it talks about is distinguishing starting, middle, and ending sounds.  For example, with the long E, it says you should do RE to start, no matter what the spelling is, RAOE in the middle, and RI at the end.  That’s actually what I already did when I learned StenEd, but then I added an asterisk to RI, because I thought it would conflict with things like ridiculous, which I wrote with RI.

     I did a horrible job recording what I changed, with StenoMaster and my asterisks and suffixes and everything, so I decided that with the VITAC book, I was going to make a list of everything I changed and actually practice and learn all of it.  I realized, though, that I never fully, 100% committed to and learned the asterisk in all of the -y endings -- -ty, -ry, -ly, etc.  So I had to put them on the list of things I needed to practice and learn. 

     And then I thought, since I never really learned this asterisk business in the first place, and since the VITAC book is going to have a different solution for any possible conflict I would have had that I was trying to avoid by using the asterisks…why keep trying to learn the asterisks?  Why not just go back to writing everything the StenEd way, and only make changes from the VITAC book?

     It was an incredibly freeing thought.  I haven’t made any progress at all in my writing for the past ten months because in September, I started with the StenoMaster, and in January I gave up on that and started with the asterisks, and somewhere in there I added all of these suffixes. I literally have 2000 suffixes and 500 prefixes. All of that pretty much destroyed my writing altogether. 

     Of course, now it’s going to be hard to unlearn what I have trained myself to do with the asterisks, but I think it will be for the best.  There are a few suffixes I’m going to have to remember to do with asterisks.  I looked through the entire VITAC book last night to see just how many there were.  It only took about half an hour, and I discovered that there aren’t many.

     I think giving up on these asterisks, and all the extra prefixes and suffixes that I never learned anyway, is the most exciting thing in steno since I learned about StenoMaster, which I was quite excited about.  The VITAC book actually does suggest one StenoMaster principle, which is using F instead of S/K, so BAFK instead of BAS/K.  That's still a hard one for me, but I've never stopped trying to use it.

    Unfortunately, now I have to go through my dictionary and delete all the things I put in with asterisks, which is going to be quite a project indeed.

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.

Wishlist

This is the list of things I need to get done, roughly in the order in which I plan to do them.

• Go back and add inflections for -ty/-fy/-vy/-ny (only 1800 entries left!)
• Change how -rate, -dor, -mon, -lish, -gree, -ple, -thor, -nate, and all words starting with ex- are defined
• Write through the Phoenix website's Conflict Finder Sentences and fix all instances of word boundary issues
• Delete any entries where -d is defined as TD
• Re-write/global all 92k dictionary entries to catch inflections and match my current writing style
• Delete briefs I don't use that came from the StenEd dictionary
• Edit some broadcast transcripts and global words/note errors
• Investigate drag/drop options in Eclipse

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.