Ch-ch-ch-changes - Dictionary Building

        Well, fall is upon us, and with the changing of the leaves, I want you to begin to change the way you write.  Change is hard.  Not many people like change.  But as Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of species that survives nor the most intelligent but the one most responsive to change.”  Well, that quote couldn’t be more fitting for a court reporter trying to become a good captioner.  There are two elements to this—theory modification and dictionary building. 

        I gather those of you making the transition from traditional court reporting to realtime and, perhaps, captioning have already begun to change your writing.  There is a great pool of material out there addressing specific writing styles, so I won’t go into that.  However, I would like to touch upon dictionary building, which is so important to captioning, whether for television or CART.

        I remember the early days CART’ing in the classroom when trying to get down a particularly speedy professor reciting an array of biology terms.  The word “allele” came up over and over again.  Unfortunately, I got through biology in high school by cheating off my friend.  Hey, nobody’s perfect!  Anyway, even if I knew what “allele” meant, it was still going to translate as “ALEGAL”—over and over and over again!  I quickly threw an asterisk in the “HRAOEL” stroke and probably got something like “ALEEL.”  At least she could read it.

        The point is all those seemingly innocent briefs we have in our dictionary to save us from writing an extra stroke at any cost will surely come back to haunt us when captioning.  After all, when I created the brief for “legal” (or adopted it, more likely, from a list given to me in theory class), it never occurred to me that it would cause a problem later on.  That is just one example of hundreds of potential problem entries. 

Ideally, you want each stroke to match itself phonetically; i.e. TET (not “at the time”), TAT (not “at that time”), AG (not “ago”), NAD (not “in addition).  Only then can you be assured when you write a multi-stroke word and for some reason or another it does not translate, you are not left with nonsensical phrases.

        I suppose I should have named this article dictionary purging rather than building, because you can spend just as much time deleting entries as you can adding them.  As previously suggested, move all those entries to a job dictionary, such as COURT or DEPOS, that can be loaded for your court reporting work while you practice captioning.

Ah, but you’re thinking, “That means when captioning I have to write everything out!”  I have some nerve, don’t I?  You may have heard this before, so I’ll reiterate.  Writing everything out will not slow you down.  You will only be slowed down if you hesitate before a stroke, which oftentimes happen with briefs—“I know I have a brief for it; now if I could only remember what it is.”

        Just try eliminating a couple briefs at a time, preferably the ones that come up all the time.  It will be easier to remember if you write a particular brief several times in one sitting.  Incidentally, briefs without vowels are safer.  You may want to just eliminate the vowel from the brief instead of the whole thing.

        As for dictionary building, simply go to the internet.  Pick a popular news site, such as CNN, read the top stories and make sure any world leaders’ names are in your dictionary.  Do a search on www.google.com for White House staff, the current and past Administrations, presidents, prime ministers, and world leaders (past and present).  Enter all those names.  Do another search for large cities throughout the world.  Enter all results.  Make briefs for every state.  I use double strokes without vowels, with the exception of a couple that I haven’t been able to think of anything.  

Some examples:

B-M/B-M=Alabama

M-T/M-T=Montana

N-P/N-P=New Hampshire

N-K/N-K=North Carolina

T-BGS/T-BGS=Texas

W-G/W-G=Wyoming

You get the idea.

Go to an entertainment site, such as E! or People, and enter all the names of top celebrities in the news today.  Do a search for past Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy winners.  I think you get the idea.  Just look through a TV Guide.  Anybody on TV should be in your dictionary.

Also enter well-known corporations.  Again, do a search on Google to obtain that information.  Be aware of different spellings.  For example, there’s a Cisco (company, SEUS/KOE), Sysco (company, SAOEUS/KOE), and Sisqo (singer, SEUS/KWOE).  Not only do you have to know the spelling variations, but you have to know how to write each one.

        It’s also a good idea to have notorious people in your dictionary (like the Manson family and serial killers, for example).  They’re always coming up for parole or are on death row and will be in the news.

        Finally, sports figures.  Again, use the internet, www.ESPN.com has a link to each sport, which includes every roster of every team, including coaching staffs.  Of course, you are not going to enter every athlete at this time, but I would suggest reading through the top stories and entering those for now.  Put your sports figures into a job dictionary called Sports.  If you end up captioning, you can build upon that.

        And remember, as fall approaches, try not to fall back into bad habits with your writing!  Until next time…ciao!