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SECTION 1  Dictation

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SECTION 2 THEORY

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The palest ink is better than the best memory – Chinese proverb
The palest ink is better than the best memory – Chinese proverb

Dictation is the ultimate test of whether you know the outlines that you have been drilling and practising and can recall outlines the instant they are need. Whilst practising, it is easy to not be aware of how long it takes to recall any particular outline, a luxury that is not available during a dictation.

Taking lots of unseen dictation will not teach you shorthand outlines, its purpose is to test your writing skills, let you know where your shorthand is at, and get you accustomed to writing shorthand without knowing what is coming next, so it does have its place in your training.

Purposeful preparation and practising of passages before taking them from dictation enables you to write at a greater speed than taking the passages unseen, and that is what you need to be doing as often as possible. It will improve your vocabulary, phrasing and neatness, thus building your skill and greatly increasing confidence.

Prepared dictations mean that you do recall instantly the selection of outlines that will be required and can concentrate a little more on the experience of a fast flow of words that must be written, with no spare moments to ponder an outline. They can still be very challenging, and once you have trained yourself for this type of experience, then an unseen dictation is the second stage.

An interim measure between prepared and unseen is to have a short passage which you revise and rearrange several times, so the most of the words are being used in various different orders; this means you can prepare and practise all the outlines as usual, but as you take the series of dictations, you don't have the luxury of having remembered the sentences themselves, they change each time.

When preparing for a dictation, practise the vocabulary and write out the passages, either in one piece so you can write over the top of it, or leaving every other line blank. When writing over the top of ink outlines, you may wish to change to using a hard pencil, so you can use the same sheet many times without making a mark.

Your speed on the known passages will increase dramatically which is a good self-encourager, as long as you remember that unseen dictations will not be as easy to write. There is no pressure as you practise at home and you will step up your expectations of yourself.

Dictation Downloads

All the shorthand articles on the Reading site www.long-live-pitmans-shorthand-reading.org.uk/blog-downloads.htm are available as MP3s in ZIP files, to accompany the PDFs of the shorthand and text. There is also one blog per month provided as a Facility Drill book and a slow dictation of 40 wpm.

www.audacityteam.org/download Audacity is a free and simple sound recording and  editing program, and I use this to tidy up the recordings. The speeds are as they naturally turned out and range from 70 to 110 words per minute.  If you can keep up with the words and are actually waiting during the gaps, then your speed capability is greater than the stated speed of the piece.

If you are just listening and not writing, you may notice that even the 100+ ones sounds quite slow, and not like natural talking, so this will give you an idea of how necessary it is to reach and surpass that speed, if you wish to avoid struggles in keeping up with speakers.

It is not only your shorthand ability that makes any particular dictation seem slow or too fast, but also the frame of mind that you are in at that time. I suggest you take a simple but "too fast" dictation first, at the beginning of your session, and do your utmost to get as much down as possible, even if it is illegible and full of gaps. This will get the mind in fast reacting mode, and then all the following dictations will seem very much slower.  It is quite astounding how it can change one's perception of what is slow and what is fast. Once you have experienced this, I hope you will be encouraged to make use of this extremely effective shorthand learning strategy. My shorthand teacher did this for us regularly, knowing its benefits, and a warm-up passage was always given in an exam, although the purpose there was also to accustom the students to the dictator's voice beforehand.

At present, the longest passage is about half an hour. It is very worthwhile to practise long passages, as after a while your mind gives up interrupting you with wondering when it will be over, and you can settle into continuous writing. I suggest you do this at a comfortable speed at first, so that you can keep up easily and there is no excuse to give in to the temptation to stop. When you have proved you can survive a long passage, it is time to speed it up, or go for more difficult matter. You can also practise stamina on long passages by visualisation, easily done on the bus/train/queue if you have the sound files on your device.

Found Dictations

Using all available spoken material for dictation practice is essential for the home learner. We are surrounded by the spoken word all the time and with a little ingenuity you can get varied shorthand practice. You do not have to know what the speed is to get the benefit – if it is fast, you can stretch your abilities, or write snatches, if it is slow you can write perfect outlines. You can do the bulk of your practising without constantly measuring your speed. If you are putting in the work, your speed cannot fail to increase.

There are many websites where you can find sound files, some are listed on the Links page. English language learning sites are a good source to investigate. They are slower than normal speaking, because the person is reading from a script, and often deliberately slowed for the benefit of non-native students of the language.

Speeches, narrations, poetry, quizzes, instructional and children's programmes, and sports commentary for the more sedate games such as snooker or darts, are generally spoken at much slower speeds than normal conversation and more carefully enunciated, because they are addressed directly to the audience or viewer.

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Slower dictations

For the slower speeds, it might be quicker to record your own sound files, by reading from the course book, than to spend precious hours trawling the internet for the occasional suitable dictation. The vocabulary will then match exactly what you have learned so far. In the early stages vocabulary is so limited that found dictations may be more frustrating than useful – store them up for later.

The easiest way to do free dictation at the lower speeds, with no helper, no computer, no sound files or tapes and no written text, is to use something you already know, such as a song, poem, rhyme, jingle, Christmas carol, hymn etc. You already know the whole text and can recite it from memory. As long as you either say the words, or imagine them being said, you are associating the outlines with the sounds, and avoiding the intrusion of longhand text. If you prepare and learn the shorthand outlines for your favourites, they will always be available to you for odd practising moments when you are away from your desk.

Making use of fast speaking

Television and radio broadcasts are exasperatingly fast but they can still be used for practice. You can write down the occasional word that you know, or snatches of common words or phrases. Talking speed may well be over 200 wpm so it is unrealistic to expect to keep up when beginning learning.

A very good use for fast speaking is to train your memory to hold the words that have got ahead of you. This is a very useful skill to have when stretching your speed, as you become accustomed to and relaxed about not always being on top of the words as they are spoken. Write what you can and endeavour to finish the sentence. Such an exercise must be done with that specific purpose in mind from the outset, and with a firm will, and not used as a fall-back excuse for constantly missing out chunks in other dictations. To prevent such a habit forming while doing the memory-training exercise, wait until the speaker finishes the missed sentence before you start to write the next one. This breaks up the writing and keeps it in a different category from the normal note-taking scenario. You end up with lots of whole sentences, rather than just a mass of unreadable fragments.

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"Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things." (Philippians 4:8)

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