The palest ink is better than the
best memory – Chinese proverbDictation
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.
Top of page
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.
Top of page |
