I decided not to wear my wrist supports anymore. It seemed like they were making my hands hurt more. My hands aren't pain-free, but they're kind of "medium" at this point. I'm pretty comfortable using the ReportIt, but I still have a lot of pain in my arms when I write. I think the ReportIt is the way to go, though. It just makes sense that having your arms supported would be better.
I'm still waiting for the Gen O IE. Upgrading cost about half as much as the machine I just bought in May, so I hope it's better somehow. Originally, they hoped to ship them in November, but they haven't even hardened the mold on the pods yet, so who knows when they'll be out.
There was a discussion on depoman about whether you can start a sentence with a conjuction, like "and" or "but" in order to break up ridiculously long sentences. Someone said that we're taught all of these grammar rules that apply to good writing, but we're not writing - we're taking down what someone has said, and you can't always force that to conform to what would be proper writing style. I would occasionally let a sentence start with "and" or "but," but more often than not I would even go so far as to delete a period I had already stroked and add a comma and the conjunction, leading to some truly long sentences.
So, with ease of readability for the consumer in mind, I took that advice into consideration. Now when the speaker seems to have ended their sentence and the next word is a conjuction, I let the period stand. I think it does help with readability, and it even allows me to break things into paragraphs more often. It's good to have discussions about things. It seems like I work in a vacuum a lot of the time, but I can't improve my style if I don't know what other people are doing.
Showing posts with label depoman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label depoman. Show all posts
Good Ideas
I've been leaning in a new direction with my speaker IDs. I started out thinking the fewer keys I used the better, so I would do the first letter of the person's name, or the last if the first letter was already being used. But now I've found that it's better to do a predominant sound in the name, because I'm probably going to have a lot of names. It's especially good for captioning when you have to get the whole news team in there, but I actually had a CART meeting where I was given 40 speakers the other day.
Some good ones I use are AUL for Paula or Paula, AIV for Dave, O*B for Bob or Rob, O*N for John, IS for Chris, AIS for Jason; the list goes on, and it's particularly helpful if I can use the same one across jobs. Chris is one that I can pretty much guarantee is always going to be IS; and for anyone who's not familiar with my speaker IDs, it's actually GLAUL, GLAIV, etc.
There was a really inspiring thread on depoman about writing verbatim or not. A lot of people are in the camp that they don't write repeated words if they don't change the meaning of the sentence, so if the person says
"I went -- I went to the store," they only put in one "I went." Someone said they've even had attorneys comment on how nice their transcripts look because of it. I don't know why I had previously been such a stickler about getting all those repeated words in if I had time, but I realized it does look much better without them, and they don't add anything, so now I don't put them in! It saves me strokes and time, and it looks better!
I also got on a little macro-making kick for a while. Brenda on the Eclipse FB group was talking about some real time-savers she came up with for actions she does often, and I thought, "Why am I even hitting Ctrl+Shift+Pg Up and then Esc to get to the top of the document?" The first command highlights your way up there, and then I had to unhighlight. I go to the top multiple times every time I review a transcript for fixes, so I just changed my keyboard map so that "V" takes me right to the top! I have E for the end.
I also check each transcript for any time I fingerspelled A and E to check for words I might've fingerspelled that I need to get in my dictionarly, so now I just hit S and W respectively to find the next instance of those. And when I'm done checking in Eclipse, I paste the file into Word and spellcheck it. Captioning files are always in all caps, so I had to navigate to the proper settings tab to uncheck that, but now I just hit Ctrl+Space bar and it automatically does it all! It's so much easier. There are so many key combinations, there's no reason to be using the mouse or pressing multiple keys for actions you do often.
Some good ones I use are AUL for Paula or Paula, AIV for Dave, O*B for Bob or Rob, O*N for John, IS for Chris, AIS for Jason; the list goes on, and it's particularly helpful if I can use the same one across jobs. Chris is one that I can pretty much guarantee is always going to be IS; and for anyone who's not familiar with my speaker IDs, it's actually GLAUL, GLAIV, etc.
There was a really inspiring thread on depoman about writing verbatim or not. A lot of people are in the camp that they don't write repeated words if they don't change the meaning of the sentence, so if the person says
"I went -- I went to the store," they only put in one "I went." Someone said they've even had attorneys comment on how nice their transcripts look because of it. I don't know why I had previously been such a stickler about getting all those repeated words in if I had time, but I realized it does look much better without them, and they don't add anything, so now I don't put them in! It saves me strokes and time, and it looks better!
I also got on a little macro-making kick for a while. Brenda on the Eclipse FB group was talking about some real time-savers she came up with for actions she does often, and I thought, "Why am I even hitting Ctrl+Shift+Pg Up and then Esc to get to the top of the document?" The first command highlights your way up there, and then I had to unhighlight. I go to the top multiple times every time I review a transcript for fixes, so I just changed my keyboard map so that "V" takes me right to the top! I have E for the end.
I also check each transcript for any time I fingerspelled A and E to check for words I might've fingerspelled that I need to get in my dictionarly, so now I just hit S and W respectively to find the next instance of those. And when I'm done checking in Eclipse, I paste the file into Word and spellcheck it. Captioning files are always in all caps, so I had to navigate to the proper settings tab to uncheck that, but now I just hit Ctrl+Space bar and it automatically does it all! It's so much easier. There are so many key combinations, there's no reason to be using the mouse or pressing multiple keys for actions you do often.
Learn Your Software
I've learned some pretty cool stuff from the Eclipse FB group. I strongly recommend checking it out if you're on Eclipse. I also watched the full 8 hours of Eclipse basic training tutorials (bo-ring!). It was mostly about title pages and auto indexing and stuff I don't use, or stuff I already know how to do, but I did pick up a couple ideas.
I have a stroke that takes me to the bottom of my realtime feed/has me follow it, and it was always bad when I forgot to hit that after I scrolled up to look at something. But I found out about the "follow always" checkbox in the realtime tab, and now that's not a problem anymore.
I learned that you can make conflicts if you want a certain thing to happen after a number. I use P-KT for % and PER/KRENT for percent, but sometimes it's so much easier to hit P-KT, that I just don't get PER/KRENT in there. I think I've got it set up now that I can write "a large P-KT" or something and it will come up "a large percent," so that's cool. I've been trying to see new opportunities for conflicts overall. Sometimes I miss the F in I've (AO*IV) and get "aye," but why not make it a conflict with the first choice being "aye"? Just today I changed YO*U from ewe to \ewe\you're, because I miss that R so often.
The best idea I got from the FB group was about suffixes. I think someone just said something about their suffix rules table, and it reminded me about how I keep getting things like "organizationtion" when I accidentally drag an extra G into ORGS/S, making it ORGS/GS. So I made a rule that when the word ends in -tion, the suffix should delete the -tion and add an -s, and voila! ORGS/GS is organizations now, and I won't get orientationtion or objectiontion or anything like that, either.
I've come up with tons of applications for that now that I've realized I can do it. No more defectiveive if I already tucked the V and forgot about it (DE/F*EFKT/IV), no more passageage if I got confused and did PAJ/AJ, no more strategicically, or longerer if I didn't realize I tucked the R (LORNG/ER). I don't think -tor was in there as a real suffix; it was in my dictionary, but it wasn't in the suffix table, so it didn't have any suffix rules. I kept getting things like compacttor and reacttor because instead of RE/AK/TOR, I'd write RAEKT/TOR.
But I fixed that rule, so it works for -tor and -tors. And I was getting things like "humorral," so I told it if you're going to add -ral and the word already ends in "r," delete the first "r." I feel like someone who does realtime already has all these suffixes in their suffix table and suffix spelling rules, and I must've missed out on them in an update or something. I should ask on depoman or the FB group for someone's tables, but I'm afraid it might mess things up. I don't see how it could, though, really; it would only change the suffixes in English. It wouldn't have anything to do with my steno outlines. I guess I'd just have to make sure all the things I've changed were still in there.
I also changed my background color from white to gray. Someone on the FB group said it's easier on the eyes. I've heard stuff like that before, but I never really thought about actually changing it until I saw it there. I really do like it better.
I have a ton of different settings files I use for different companies, so it's a pain to change suffix tables or whatever in all of them. I asked about it on FB, and Dave Stanley said that I could just have a global.set that all settings would use for certain things. It seemed like a great idea, except that it overwrites your realtime settings if you let it change your translation settings. It also overwrites your job dictionaries no matter what you do, which is a drag.
I learned how to finally get TM to stop messing with my stroke for "a," which is awesome. I told it to stop pulling "an" and "everyone" into other words, too. I actually turned TM up a bit. The new sliders are kind of confusing, but I understand them now. My main problem was that TM wasn't being aggressive enough; there were tons of words it just left alone. So I unchecked "require an untran," and I bumped it up from whatever it was at (it might've been as low as 1%) to 30%, and I think it's doing better now.
I found out there's a dictionary entry you can use to reject the last AB suggestion and get a new one all at once, and I also found a macro for requesting a brief for the last word, which I think will come in handy.
I have a stroke that takes me to the bottom of my realtime feed/has me follow it, and it was always bad when I forgot to hit that after I scrolled up to look at something. But I found out about the "follow always" checkbox in the realtime tab, and now that's not a problem anymore.
I learned that you can make conflicts if you want a certain thing to happen after a number. I use P-KT for % and PER/KRENT for percent, but sometimes it's so much easier to hit P-KT, that I just don't get PER/KRENT in there. I think I've got it set up now that I can write "a large P-KT" or something and it will come up "a large percent," so that's cool. I've been trying to see new opportunities for conflicts overall. Sometimes I miss the F in I've (AO*IV) and get "aye," but why not make it a conflict with the first choice being "aye"? Just today I changed YO*U from ewe to \ewe\you're, because I miss that R so often.
The best idea I got from the FB group was about suffixes. I think someone just said something about their suffix rules table, and it reminded me about how I keep getting things like "organizationtion" when I accidentally drag an extra G into ORGS/S, making it ORGS/GS. So I made a rule that when the word ends in -tion, the suffix should delete the -tion and add an -s, and voila! ORGS/GS is organizations now, and I won't get orientationtion or objectiontion or anything like that, either.
I've come up with tons of applications for that now that I've realized I can do it. No more defectiveive if I already tucked the V and forgot about it (DE/F*EFKT/IV), no more passageage if I got confused and did PAJ/AJ, no more strategicically, or longerer if I didn't realize I tucked the R (LORNG/ER). I don't think -tor was in there as a real suffix; it was in my dictionary, but it wasn't in the suffix table, so it didn't have any suffix rules. I kept getting things like compacttor and reacttor because instead of RE/AK/TOR, I'd write RAEKT/TOR.
But I fixed that rule, so it works for -tor and -tors. And I was getting things like "humorral," so I told it if you're going to add -ral and the word already ends in "r," delete the first "r." I feel like someone who does realtime already has all these suffixes in their suffix table and suffix spelling rules, and I must've missed out on them in an update or something. I should ask on depoman or the FB group for someone's tables, but I'm afraid it might mess things up. I don't see how it could, though, really; it would only change the suffixes in English. It wouldn't have anything to do with my steno outlines. I guess I'd just have to make sure all the things I've changed were still in there.
I also changed my background color from white to gray. Someone on the FB group said it's easier on the eyes. I've heard stuff like that before, but I never really thought about actually changing it until I saw it there. I really do like it better.
I have a ton of different settings files I use for different companies, so it's a pain to change suffix tables or whatever in all of them. I asked about it on FB, and Dave Stanley said that I could just have a global.set that all settings would use for certain things. It seemed like a great idea, except that it overwrites your realtime settings if you let it change your translation settings. It also overwrites your job dictionaries no matter what you do, which is a drag.
I learned how to finally get TM to stop messing with my stroke for "a," which is awesome. I told it to stop pulling "an" and "everyone" into other words, too. I actually turned TM up a bit. The new sliders are kind of confusing, but I understand them now. My main problem was that TM wasn't being aggressive enough; there were tons of words it just left alone. So I unchecked "require an untran," and I bumped it up from whatever it was at (it might've been as low as 1%) to 30%, and I think it's doing better now.
I found out there's a dictionary entry you can use to reject the last AB suggestion and get a new one all at once, and I also found a macro for requesting a brief for the last word, which I think will come in handy.
12.7.13
I was feeling pretty confident about things after the CCP/CBC exam, and I decided I couldn't wait around anymore for my arm to feel better. I applied to about 15 CART companies trying to drum up some real work. I got promising responses from a few. It's three weeks later now, and I've only actually done any work for one, and that's only been a couple of hours. I'm hopeful about getting some classes from another next semester, but I'm not sure it'll be a full schedule.
I'm starting to have serious doubts about my ability to make a career out of CART. I don't like having downtime. I'd rather be working. Like it or not, I'm about to have an entire month off. I may actually have to invest in captioning. The good thing about that is I can start any time; it's not dependent on semester schedules.
I've been having a problem where I keep writng -fy as FAOI, even though that's "fie" and -fy should be FEU. I had SUR as Sur for some reason instead of sur-, which caused a problem somewhere, so I fixed that. I wrote that Frozen was a "prison success movie," which was just weird. I guess it's good that it translated that way, but I certainly didn't remember that I'm supposed to write "princess" as PRIN/S*ES. Maybe I should change prison to PR*IN.
Jill posted a brilliant idea on depoman. Instead of just having "-ville" and "-borough" and whatnot just attach, she has them defined to cap the previous word *and* attach to it! I updated a few pertinent entries of my own to do that, and it's totally awesome.
I also joined the Eclipse group on FB, where I've learned some great tricks. You can use ALT + S/ALT + A to add a single word to your spelling dictionary instead of having to run a spellcheck which pushes you down to the next misspelled word whether you wanted to go anywhere or not, which is a lifesaver. There's a command to bring up your steno notes if they're not showing up on a transcript.
The most important thing I saw was a reminder to upgrade to Version 6.0.0.12. I was on .9, and I don't even think I knew there was another update. If I did, I didn't know it was a stable one. I upgraded, and it turns out they fixed the auto-brief window so it works in keyboard macro output! They fixed it around the start of the semester. I *so* wish I had known that! It would've been amazing. I've got it going now, but there's only one week left in the semester.
I haven't had time for dictionary maintenence for a while, but there was a period where I was making good progress on it. I decided it made more sense for ya'll to be YAL and -ial to be Y*AL, so I changed 961 entries. I was really used to doing -ial as YAL, though, and it's not going over so well in my writing yet. -cade needed to be KA*ID to avoid conflicting with Cade, but there weren't many of those. Similarly, -tate (141 entries) got updated to TA*IT to avoid conflicting with Tate.
-gate (162) had to be GA*ET, for obvious reasons. I was writing -ality as ALT and it wasn't translating, so I did 434 of those. Latin was defined as LANT, which made sense. I'm not sure I actually even write it that way, but I updated 86 -lant entries to be LA*NT. -rate words (465) weren't working as RA*T, although I thought I fixed that already. I went ahead and did 84 -fied words as FAOID and FID, so that should work no matter which way I do it.
BER is ber-, so I updated -ber (208) as B*ER. "-zation" words (273) weren't coming out properly. I think I decided they should be fine as STKAIGS, but I defined them all as STKA*IGS for some reason. I wanted my para- prefix (232) to be PA*R, but it wasn't defined. -cate (238) wasn't working as K*AT. YOR is yore, so -ior (84) had to be Y*OR. I'd probably write yore as YOER, though, so I'm not sure I really needed to do that one.
I'm down to only 13 more problems to fix, so maybe I can get them done over winter break.
I'm starting to have serious doubts about my ability to make a career out of CART. I don't like having downtime. I'd rather be working. Like it or not, I'm about to have an entire month off. I may actually have to invest in captioning. The good thing about that is I can start any time; it's not dependent on semester schedules.
I've been having a problem where I keep writng -fy as FAOI, even though that's "fie" and -fy should be FEU. I had SUR as Sur for some reason instead of sur-, which caused a problem somewhere, so I fixed that. I wrote that Frozen was a "prison success movie," which was just weird. I guess it's good that it translated that way, but I certainly didn't remember that I'm supposed to write "princess" as PRIN/S*ES. Maybe I should change prison to PR*IN.
Jill posted a brilliant idea on depoman. Instead of just having "-ville" and "-borough" and whatnot just attach, she has them defined to cap the previous word *and* attach to it! I updated a few pertinent entries of my own to do that, and it's totally awesome.
I also joined the Eclipse group on FB, where I've learned some great tricks. You can use ALT + S/ALT + A to add a single word to your spelling dictionary instead of having to run a spellcheck which pushes you down to the next misspelled word whether you wanted to go anywhere or not, which is a lifesaver. There's a command to bring up your steno notes if they're not showing up on a transcript.
The most important thing I saw was a reminder to upgrade to Version 6.0.0.12. I was on .9, and I don't even think I knew there was another update. If I did, I didn't know it was a stable one. I upgraded, and it turns out they fixed the auto-brief window so it works in keyboard macro output! They fixed it around the start of the semester. I *so* wish I had known that! It would've been amazing. I've got it going now, but there's only one week left in the semester.
I haven't had time for dictionary maintenence for a while, but there was a period where I was making good progress on it. I decided it made more sense for ya'll to be YAL and -ial to be Y*AL, so I changed 961 entries. I was really used to doing -ial as YAL, though, and it's not going over so well in my writing yet. -cade needed to be KA*ID to avoid conflicting with Cade, but there weren't many of those. Similarly, -tate (141 entries) got updated to TA*IT to avoid conflicting with Tate.
-gate (162) had to be GA*ET, for obvious reasons. I was writing -ality as ALT and it wasn't translating, so I did 434 of those. Latin was defined as LANT, which made sense. I'm not sure I actually even write it that way, but I updated 86 -lant entries to be LA*NT. -rate words (465) weren't working as RA*T, although I thought I fixed that already. I went ahead and did 84 -fied words as FAOID and FID, so that should work no matter which way I do it.
BER is ber-, so I updated -ber (208) as B*ER. "-zation" words (273) weren't coming out properly. I think I decided they should be fine as STKAIGS, but I defined them all as STKA*IGS for some reason. I wanted my para- prefix (232) to be PA*R, but it wasn't defined. -cate (238) wasn't working as K*AT. YOR is yore, so -ior (84) had to be Y*OR. I'd probably write yore as YOER, though, so I'm not sure I really needed to do that one.
I'm down to only 13 more problems to fix, so maybe I can get them done over winter break.
Chair Saga
I'm starting to use the Goodwill for the first time, really. For a
while I was sitting without using the back rest at all, and that's made
my back hurt, so I'm trying something different. Whenever I try to sit
with my back against the back of a chair, I can't seem to "reach" the
steno keyboard properly, even just putting the LS on my lap. But this
chair is pretty adjustable, so I tilted the back all the way forward. I
had to take the LS off the tripod, but I've written with it that way a
couple of times, and it seems to be working okay. I don't know if it's
making my back feel any better, and it definitely feels weird to write
that way, but at least I am resting my back on something.
I wanted to get a fancy ergonomic chair, something that would be really good. I thought about an Aeron chair, but I've seen a lot of people not liking those. They're also insanely expensive, and it might not fit, and if it breaks it's expensive to repair. I went to a showroom and tried out some Lifeform chairs. They're also anywhere from $1-3k. They were pretty comfy, but they didn't do anything to make my arm feel better, so I decided they weren't worth it.
I think it must've been an NCRA newsletter where I saw the Soma Court Reporter Chair listed; or maybe someone on depoman posted a link to the newsletter. Either way, I remembered it, and looked into it. I figured it would be the best chair, since I could use my tripod with it. After a couple weeks of thinking about it, I decided to get it. I called the two Soma dealers in my state, and after a couple more weeks of going back and forth with them, basically came to the conclusion that neither one of them could help me out.
So I called Soma directly, and talked to a really nice guy who got all the different components picked out for me. He said if I picked up the chair at one of the dealers, they could adjust it to fit me there, and I'd be able to swap out a backrest or something if it wasn't right. That sounded pretty awesome, so he emailed them. Two weeks went by and I didn't hear anything, so I called him back, and he called them, and they called me. They sent out a "proposal" for the chair, but it was missing the cutout. So I called the local place, and they said they'd check with the Soma guy.
A week later, I called the local place again. The representative said she emailed Soma twice, but they must be on vacation. Right. So I called Soma myself, and he said I don't need the court reporter cutout because I'm getting a split seat, and there's a space for the tripod. I went along with it and called the local place back, and officially placed my order. I think the standard wait time is about 5-6 weeks.
I'm a little concerned about the lack of a cutout, though. I wasn't sure the cutout was going to be deep enough to begin with, because I like my steno machine really close. Looking at pictures, it seems like the split is even more shallow. I don't know what the point of getting an $800 chair was if it's not even going to have the cutout. But hopefully all the adjustments, and the fact that it was under $1k, will make it worth it. It's got to be better than the two chairs I'm using right now.
I wanted to get a fancy ergonomic chair, something that would be really good. I thought about an Aeron chair, but I've seen a lot of people not liking those. They're also insanely expensive, and it might not fit, and if it breaks it's expensive to repair. I went to a showroom and tried out some Lifeform chairs. They're also anywhere from $1-3k. They were pretty comfy, but they didn't do anything to make my arm feel better, so I decided they weren't worth it.
I think it must've been an NCRA newsletter where I saw the Soma Court Reporter Chair listed; or maybe someone on depoman posted a link to the newsletter. Either way, I remembered it, and looked into it. I figured it would be the best chair, since I could use my tripod with it. After a couple weeks of thinking about it, I decided to get it. I called the two Soma dealers in my state, and after a couple more weeks of going back and forth with them, basically came to the conclusion that neither one of them could help me out.
So I called Soma directly, and talked to a really nice guy who got all the different components picked out for me. He said if I picked up the chair at one of the dealers, they could adjust it to fit me there, and I'd be able to swap out a backrest or something if it wasn't right. That sounded pretty awesome, so he emailed them. Two weeks went by and I didn't hear anything, so I called him back, and he called them, and they called me. They sent out a "proposal" for the chair, but it was missing the cutout. So I called the local place, and they said they'd check with the Soma guy.
A week later, I called the local place again. The representative said she emailed Soma twice, but they must be on vacation. Right. So I called Soma myself, and he said I don't need the court reporter cutout because I'm getting a split seat, and there's a space for the tripod. I went along with it and called the local place back, and officially placed my order. I think the standard wait time is about 5-6 weeks.
I'm a little concerned about the lack of a cutout, though. I wasn't sure the cutout was going to be deep enough to begin with, because I like my steno machine really close. Looking at pictures, it seems like the split is even more shallow. I don't know what the point of getting an $800 chair was if it's not even going to have the cutout. But hopefully all the adjustments, and the fact that it was under $1k, will make it worth it. It's got to be better than the two chairs I'm using right now.
Positive Influences
I had the opportunity to talk with Stan
after the CBC exam, which was really cool. I got to test out his LSS (with
pads on the keys), and I did not like that at all. It was like trying to
write on a squishy mattress. I also got to see him write, and one thing I
picked up was that he writes periods with both hands. I'd read before
that's a good idea, to avoid stacking, but I just couldn't wrap my brain
around the idea of doing it.
Seeing Stan do it made me realize how easy it would be, though, and now I've got a two-handed stroke for periods, commas, and new speakers. Getting myself trained to use those strokes is easily the hardest thing I can ever remember doing in steno. It felt so unnatural! It seemed like there was absolutely no way it would ever work. But after a few days, it did. I still have hiccups and confusion with it from time to time, but I don't have stacking issues anymore, so it's probably worth it.
I was reading Mirabai's blog over the summer, and I read that she did transcription for offline captioning while she was in school. That sounded like the perfect job for a steno student. I wanted to look into it, but I wasn't sure what to do, so I asked on Depoman. I received some great advice, and one of the members pointed me in the direction of the WAHM forum for work at home moms.
Through that forum, I found an opportunity to do transcription at home. I don't use my steno machine, and it doesn't pay very much, so I tend to wind up working more hours than I might somewhere else, but I absolutely love being able to work from home whenever I want, completely at the whim of my own schedule. And it's about a thousand times better than where I was working, so I can't thank Mirabai and the Depoman forum enough!
Seeing Stan do it made me realize how easy it would be, though, and now I've got a two-handed stroke for periods, commas, and new speakers. Getting myself trained to use those strokes is easily the hardest thing I can ever remember doing in steno. It felt so unnatural! It seemed like there was absolutely no way it would ever work. But after a few days, it did. I still have hiccups and confusion with it from time to time, but I don't have stacking issues anymore, so it's probably worth it.
I was reading Mirabai's blog over the summer, and I read that she did transcription for offline captioning while she was in school. That sounded like the perfect job for a steno student. I wanted to look into it, but I wasn't sure what to do, so I asked on Depoman. I received some great advice, and one of the members pointed me in the direction of the WAHM forum for work at home moms.
Through that forum, I found an opportunity to do transcription at home. I don't use my steno machine, and it doesn't pay very much, so I tend to wind up working more hours than I might somewhere else, but I absolutely love being able to work from home whenever I want, completely at the whim of my own schedule. And it's about a thousand times better than where I was working, so I can't thank Mirabai and the Depoman forum enough!
5.18
I ordered the VITAC book. I had the bright idea to e-mail VITAC directly and see if they knew where I could get one, and someone e-mailed me back the next day saying I could call and order from them. It’s a good thing I had poked around the VITAC site a bit, because the e-mail simply came from the author of the book and had no subject! I discovered this morning that there are actually still three seats open in the Caption Masters class. I guess the other display was an error. So I might still be able to take that in July, and all the information in the VITAC book might be discussed in the class, but that’s all right. You can never have too many steno books, I guess.
Yesterday I was on depoman searching for posts about something or other, and I came across the suggestion that one should add dictionary entries from the machine to practice fingerspelling. And it’s a useful thing to be able to do, anyway. So I spent a good hour yesterday getting that all set up. I’m still trying to figure out my alphabets, though. I need to have a way to fingerspell in capital and lowercase in realtime and in the global window, so that’s four alphabets. I spent some time on it today and I think I have it worked out.
I got my two minutes together today, and I also managed to stack three words, although not on that final take. "Here and staying" came out as STKPHAOEURG. I got to record a drill exercise at 120, which is better than I’ve done for the past 2 days, but I also had to record one at 50. Apparently, I have a really, really hard time with "fr-" words, which is weird because FR is my brief for from, which I write all the time.
It’s really fun to be able to do things from the machine. After every take, I go back and write any mis-strokes five times, along with the words before and after them. It was always a hassle to take my hands off the machine to scroll down through the take, but now I don’t have to!
5.16
I just finished fixing what was lost between Wednesday and Friday, to the best of my ability, so that's exciting. I guess it's good that that happened so early in the life of this blog, though, because now I know that I need to keep a backup of all of my posts.
I think writing with shorter nails is quieter, as you would expect it to be. It almost seems like my fingers make a squishy sound on the keys now, though. I noticed during my drill practice that I have a real problem writing "-SH" when I mean to write "-CH." I definitely didn't feel like I made any progress on my two minutes together today, but for this last minute, I picked up on something that Gregorio mentioned on depoman. He was talking about how to pass tests, and he said that during practice, you should always make your last take a good one, and write it at a speed you're comfortable with. Of course, I've heard that many times from different sources, including other people on the forum and my professor at STLCC. I never actually did it, though.
People always seemed to say the reason was so that you would leave feeling good about your practice, no matter how poorly you actually did that day, and I always thought I was strong enough that I didn't need that. My professor also put it in terms of "writing for control" after speedbuilding, but I basically write for control the entire time, so I didn't feel like I needed to do that, either. But when Gregorio talked about it in terms of helping pass tests, I decided to give it a try, and I really like it. It's really nice to be able to write the thing that I just spent an hour failing to write, because after failing for a week (or three) straight, I start to feel like it's something that I'll never be able to do, and even though it's at a slower speed, it makes me feel better to be able to write it. I don't think that had anything to do with me getting that last minute so fast (comparatively) either, though.
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.
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