I don’t do a lot of dictation practice; I mostly practice by using Gregg in my life as a replacement for longhand, taking notes at meetings, etc.
However, from time to time, I test my speed, to see how much of an improvement I’ve made over time. I find that there can be a lot of variability in the results: on difficult literary dictations, I can manage 80wpm, on easier ones I can mange 100wpm.
So far, sounds about right. But what puzzles me is what makes a difficult dictation.
I’ve found that I do especially well, when:
- There are lots of phrases.
- There are a lot of prefixes and suffixes.
- There are lots of words that can be abbreviated.
- There are a lot brief forms and their derivatives.
Strangely I found I can do rather badly on sentences like: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. “John Smith has a new blue car”. In such sentences I am forced to write everything out (apart from “over the”), and my speed drops to 80wpm or so.
I wonder how fast shorthand can be written by penmanship alone. I’m wondering whether it’s my penmanship that’s the problem. How fast are you able to write “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”?
Since the outlines are being written separately, the fact that you naturally have to stop after writing each outline will definitely affect your speed. Work on making those stops as short as possible and to move from outline to outline as quickly as you can. Eventually, there is going to be a point in which it will be physically impossible to write quickly without relying on your brain to remember what was being said (the writer’s word-carrying ability). This usually happens over 100 wpm (you will notice); until then, train your hand to be swift and your brain not to hesitate.
Thanks for your reply.
I do feel that its the spaces which are the problem. Zoubek's notes have very little space in between the outlines.
For this reason, I do feel like scrapping the phrasing pringciple, found in 1916, "to denote "of the" in phrases, write the two words close together". It's one of the main things keeping me from writing my notes in a more compact form. Also there are so many exceptions and edge cases: you can't safely use it if the first word is "some", "many", "most", [any number greater or equal to 2] etc. If you count up all these exceptions, you can only really use it once every 100 words of so at the most. Whilst excessive spacing tends to affect every outline.
In fact, I observe that Zoubek's notes don't seem to use this principle, although presumably he wrote pre-anniversary.
I find it interesting that this phrasing principle, dating back to 1888, was one of those scrapped in Anniversary. A lot of the other changes scrapped tended to be reporter-like shortcuts inserted in the 1916 and 1902 editions.
You're welcome. You're really not gaining much speed by omitting "of the." I rarely omit it in English … contrary to Spanish, which takes a lot of space to write!
Also, like I said, this is more of a time-spent-per-outline issue rather than a spacing-between-outlines issue. Work on writing outlines fast (not drawing) and moving swiftly from outline to outline; the spacing will take care of itself. Usually, when dictation goes extremely fast, outlines will tend to be written with much more space between them (look at Dupraw's and Sklarew's notes in Andrew's website), so concentrating on spacing is not as important as being as fast as you can in both writing the outlines and going from outline to outline.
Incidentally, that negligence case passage was written in Anniversary, although the 1916 version of the same text would differ very little.
So essentially it's not the spaces that matter so much, it's really the time taken in between outlines (and also within outlines)?
I'm making sure I'm rounding out my angles, or at least not pausing on the angles. I feel sometimes what messes me over is when I start of a word wrong, and then have to think how to save it. It totally breaks my flow.
So the next thing is to reduce the inter-outlines pauses?
From what I understand, you should go from one outline to another as if it were one stroke, the only difference is you lift the pen. This should create a "get-away" stroke, where the pen has left the paper without deccelerating?
So essentially it's not the spaces that matter so much, it's really the time taken in between outlines (and also within outlines)? Exactly.
So the next thing is to reduce the inter-outlines pauses? Yes. This means that you're probably hesitating between outlines. Most of the hesitation comes because the writer is unsure about the outline. For this you need to review theory and read a lot of shorthand. Also, if you hear a word, think of it in shorthand right away: it develops brain quickness in creating shorthand outlines (you can’t write what’s not in the brain first). Write it down if you can (you can check the dictionary later). You'll be surprised at how quickly your writing will be if you start thinking in shorthand in your daily routine. Another thing to try is to write a passage from a book or newspaper and see if you can write it without hesitation; without stopping to think about outlines. If you stop, then it means that you need to do a vocabulary preview of the passage: read the passage in longhand and circle those words that can create a problem. Write those words in shorthand first. Then write the passage again without stopping. Eventually, the hesitation will go away.
This should create a "get-away" stroke, where the pen has left the paper without deccelerating? Correct. The get-away stroke comes when the writing is fluid: you are not hesitating in writing and you are lifting the pen quickly to write the next outline. If you pause, the outline will end with a dot.
Another trick is to write words in groups. Instead of "the…ok, next word is complex…complex," write "the complex theory" in one thought. In French class, we wrote "je suis, tu es, il est, elle est, on est" a gazillion times, and 35 years later it's still there.
The posts here mostly deal with how to speed up our shorthand, which is valuable. But I think Niten Ichi's original question poses an interesting problem: If you can write most shorthand at a certain speed, should you be able to write the quick brown fox sentence at that speed? I"m inclined to say no. This sentence consists mostly of one-syllable words that cannot be abbreviated or joined together. Thus each word except for "the" and "over" is written with several letters (three to five, in this case) and is followed by a space. This must slow things down. So a sentence like "I will not be able to come to the meeting," which is one syllable longer than the quick brown fox, should be able to be written much faster.
I agree with you, and I refer to the abundance of spaces between words in my original reply, but I think that dropping from 100 to 80 wpm is a little too much. I also think that since the passage is so short (8 standard words), the error in measuring the actual writing speed will be larger because the writing time is so short (6 seconds for 80 wpm). A longer passage with short words may give a better indication of the actual writing speed of those kinds of passages.
I agree with you too. If a writer should want to time a short sentence like the quick brown fox, maybe a way to do it would be to write it several times in a row — say twenty or so — to get a more accurate timing.
The measurements of 80wpm of "The quick ….." were taken by writing the phrase ten times. The word count used was the standard NCRA 1.4 syllables per standard word.
Thinking about this, I used the teeline dictations to determine my peak speed of 100wpm. This could be in actual words per minute instead of standard words per minute. If actual words are used on "The quick brown fox…." this would bring it to 92wpm.