Are there rules for combination strokes?

I’m calling them combination strokes, but I don’t know what they are really called. (Strokes like nd, det/ted, mn, den, dem, rd, ld, etc.)

My question is, are there any rules for words that have more than one possibility for which stroke you use? Words like mountain for example. You could write “m-ou-nt-n” or  “m-ou-n-ten.”  My brain usually picks the blend I hear first, in this case using the “nt” stroke, but the book uses the “ten” stroke.

On the other hand, for the word burden it uses the “rd” stroke instead of the “den” stroke.

For detain, you could write “det-a-n” but instead the book uses “d-e-ten.”  There are lots of other words that have two possibilities, and I can’t always remember which way is right. Are there any rules to help me remember?


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  1. Well, the ten/den blend always has priority over the nt/nd blend, as stated in the manual. It says this is easier to write. The rest are not stated explicitly in the manual, but they're easy enough to figure out using the dictionary. "Detain" and "tedium" show that the ten/den and tem/dem blends have priority over det/ded. Similar combing through the dictionary gives me this list: ld > ten/den > det/ded/men/mem > nt/nd. As an Anniversary writer, I don't have experience with the rd blend, but based on the usage in "burden", I would place it in the same spot as the ld blend.

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