I've been lurking around here for quite a while. I've been gleaning all I can from the different forums. My problem is I've put my shorts in using a mish-mash of the different 'systems' posted. One week I'll put everything in using abcz, the next week using the grow method, another week something else. I have shorts that really aren't short and very unwieldy. I currently have about 7000 shorts and I know (and confirmed it in the statistics report) that I'm not using them often enough - only a 23% savings in keystrokes.

So, I'm wondering if I should just scrap my current dictionary altogether and start over, or try to go back in and edit the entries I already have to make them uniform.

I've been doing transcription for 18+ years and have used expanders frequently in the past, but the last couple years trying to come up with a really good dictionary/system to help me get/keep my production up is driving me nuts! The company I work for provides SH (ver. 10) and I really like it. I've tried numerous times to try and type with the advisory window up but I can't get my mind to work that way. I don't know, maybe it's just the fibro-fog . . .

So, have any of you just scrapped the whole thing and started from scratch?

Thanks
Roodie

More than a year later, here's my reply for what it's worth now. I found myself in the same boat, although I did buy Saving Keystrokes when I started and that helped in the beginning. I've only been in the business about 6 years, and never heard of ABCZ or GROW until I found this forum a few weeks ago. Now, what I am doing is adding entries with the system I want, but keeping my old shorts (unless they conflict with something new, then I have to decide which to go with). This seems to be working for me as I retrain my brain, and still have the old ones to fall back on.

Okay, first thing is that unless you have shorts for most of the most common English words and phrases, not just the medical stuff, it's going to be uphill going to see any significant keystroke saving because the vast majority of what you type in any field is very common English words and phrases. If you're not abbreviating 80% of what you type (high-frequency common English), there's only so much you can do with the rest of it to get keystroke savings.



I would strongly advise a uniform system in which you know what the short for the word/phrase should be without a lot of memorization. You can be a little idiosyncratic with one-letter shorts for very short but very high-frequency words, but once you get past that, the more system the better. Of course, if you've committed those 7000 shorts to memory over the last 18 years, maybe you are fine continuing with the ones you know.  OTOH, any attempt to enter more in some system is going to result in conflicts with what you've already got, so then you'll be tempted to make even more shorts that don't follow consistent rules...and again things may break down for you.



Okay, if you're feeling the real need of the advisory window at this point, then clearly your 7000 no-system/multisystem shorts actually aren't all committed to memory and aren't working all that well for you.



Yeah, I made several false starts after I started transcribing on a computer and realized you could "short" things with AutoCorrect, and then I changed things around a bit again when I met really good expanders and didn't need to end things with j to make sure it wasn't an English word. (Well, okay, technically there are a couple of words that end in j, but I don't type much about hajs or rajs.)

When I did get online and discovered stuff like Shorthand and IT, I played around with both ABCZ and Grow, but stuck to my own system in the end, which is more written alphabetic shorthand based--skip the vowels unless the word starts with one or you need to differentiate words that only differ by a vowel (than-then) or prefixes ditto (hypo is ho for me and hyper hr), consider prefixes and suffixes separately so you don't waste all your letters on something that has lebenty-leben thousand words starting with it, and code stuff with a distinctive standard last letter for hyphenated forms and those kinds of conflicts. However, I don't think what system you use matters nearly as much as that you have a system. I will say that to minimize conflicts and get the most workable system, you really should start designing from the most common words/word families and build from there. You need shorts for those anyway.

I just updated an old thread in regard to some of this, so you might check that out:
http://www.productivitytalk.com/forums/ind...?showtopic=3496

See the numbers there?  There are 150 words that are going to account for 50% of what you type. If you can shorten those an average of 50% and you never, ever type any of those you abbreviate in long form, in or out of phrases, that's 25% of your keystrokes saved right there--a fast, easy, simple 25% saving. If you can only shorten those 150 words by an average of a third, that's still a 15% saving for very little work at all. Now you need to look over the frequency list and decide which very short words you do what with. However, if you are using a marker key or the spacebar to put in spaces, cutting even a very frequent 2-letter word by a letter will save you a keystroke--and for heaven's sake give yourself 1-letter shorts for and and the--that saves you half your keystrokes every time you type them, and you are going to type both a lot. That sneaky li'l the is the most frequent word in everything all the time--7% of what you type. Shorten it from 4 keystrokes to 2, and that one word will say you 3.5% of your keystrokes.  In fact, let's just look at the top 10 words and their frequencies on the General Service List:
the 6.9975
be 3.9175
of 3.6432
and 2.8401
a 2.2996
to 2.619
in 2.1338
he 2.0033
have 1.2458
it 1.1247

No way you can shorten "a", but if on the other 9 you shorten the the 2-letter words to 1 letter, you will save 1/3 of your keystrokes on them.  Shorten the 3-letter words to 1 as well, saving 1/2 your keystrokes on them, and the 4-letter word to 2, which will save you 2/5 on it. Total them up, and you will have shortened the 10 an average of only 30% because one doesn't count and most of the rest are very short already. However, because they are all so very frequently typed, you will save 5% of your keystrokes every day if you never short another word. How many of those 9 shortenable words are you shorting now each and every time you type them?

Heck, just start typing one letter for "and" and "the" tomorrow plus marker key or spacebar, and that's over 4% of your keystrokes saved, 2 strokes instead of 4 every time you type one of those words. (I use k and j for those respectively because those keys are under my strongest fingers, both words are typed frequently enough I'll never forget the idiosyncratic shorts, and there are a lot of other frequent words in competition for those other letters in the alphabet. But it almost doesn't matter what letter you shorten those each to tomorrow as long as you shorten them.)

Attack the 150 most common English words first. Make sure you get a good keystroke saving there, and then go on to the rest of your new system. Don't expend an outrageous amount of time on words, though. Get the couple of hundred most common general and medical each in there, and then work on the most common phrases. Use lexical data and tools to go after the highest frequencies first for general, academic, and medical words and phrases. If your time is limited, just redo the very top of each list for now, see how you like the short system you've chosen, and then redo your statistics. You are going to see decent keystroke savings with a minimum of time and work invested. If you don't like the way assignments are working out, you can reevaluate your choice of system without having to toss out and relearn too much to do it. (And do yourself a favor if you are playing around with systems/new shorts. Put everything in an Excel spreadsheet from which you can import to your expander rather than straight into your expander. That will allow you to sort, shuffle, compare, and batch alter shorts very quickly if you change your mind about something.)

Yes, to be sure you don't want to type out cholecystectomy of esophagogastroduodenoscopy in full. Who does? I'm not saying you aren't going to want to have shorts for those pesky long medical terms that aggravate your fingers. Just realize that you won't save nearly as many keystrokes even greatly shortening those as you will using less spectacular shorts for common words that probably roll off your fingers so easily that you never felt any real need to short them. Rethink that if you really want to push that percentage keystrokes saved number up for yourself.

Good luck!