I'm thinking too hard

I have lost count of how many word endings I have learned over the past three weeks. I'm still feeling a bit shell-shocked from all the information that I've absorbed. In fact, I occasionally get stumped during dictation and stop to figure out what key stroke to use for a particular ending. In my struggle to dig deep into my brain and hunt down the information that I'm looking for, the man dictating sentences through my headphones continues to dictate. HOW RUDE! What ~ he's not going to wait for me to catch up? And then the "Duh" moment hits me: The longer you stop writing, the farther behind you get in your transcribing. Bad girl! Bad.

Our court reporting instructors told us at the beginning of this quarter that it is OK to drop words. And they expect us to do it. You can always go back and figure out what you missed from the context of the conversation. Unfortuantely, I'm kind of a perfectionist and I want to have a clean transcript immediately. So the "just skip it and move on" concept is hard for me to do. There are two skills that I'm dealing with here, and they are in direct conflict with each other.

1. Recalling the knowledge, and,
2. Doing it at great speed.

Maybe it's too early to expect fast recall at this point, but it's what I'm striving for. Besides, it's what make a good court reporter, and that is what I want to be.

So today I will practice my speed building. My mantra is: I will drop words and I will be OK with that.

A calmness finally returns

After several weeks of feeling like I've been pummelled with information and falling behind, I'm back in the saddle again. I spent the weekend going back over the chapters that were troubling me and it paid off. I achieved a 98% on tonight's quiz ~ yay!

So moving forward with today's chapter was much easier. Chapter 32 is about words beginning with U, UN and UNDER. UN and UNDER are easy.

The U is a little tricky. Using the single letter U is out of the question. That is reserved for the shortcut of the word "you". When you spell out the word "you" it's YAOU ~ and that's what you write when starting words like unanimous, united, or utensil. When the long u sound is followed by a consonant sound in the same syllable, you include it with the long u sound. An example of this would be the word "urethane". Written out in steno, it looks like this: YAOUR/THAIN

With a little practice, I think this will come naturally.

Two steps forward, one step back

I'm taking the time to go back and review a couple of chapters that I didn't grasp too well ~ Chapters 28 and 29.

As I mentioned before, there was A LOT to absorb in these two chapters. On top of that, these theories were not cut into marble. There are a lot of variables that can occur. Like words ending in the ANS sound; as in guidance, inheritance and relevance. Sometimes you add the ANS with the last syllable and consonant: GAOI/DANS, IN/HERT/TANS, and REL/VANS and sometimes you tack on just the NS if you can fit it in at the end of the word, DE/FAOINS (defiance), KOM/PLAOINS (compliance) and PUR/SAOUNS (pursuance). I know this should confuse me, but it does.

Study, study, study.

Chapters 30 and 31

We studied the theories from Chapters 30 and 31 this week. I've lost track of how many word endings we've learned. I think I may have forgotten more than I've learned by now.

Thankfully, I had Friday off from work and had an extra day to study. This made a big difference this week. I don't feel quite as lost and am, once again, feeling back on track.

I'll have to remember this in the future. When I begin to get frustrated and lost, take a vacation day and decompress and study a bit!

Well, friends, back to studying!