Practice Ideas

These are ideas for different ways to practice. Especially if you're finding yourself stuck on a plateau (this happens; it's a normal part of the learning process) switching up your practice or focusing in on a single thing can significantly help your progress.

Try these and see what works for you!

Practice to a Beat
Forcing yourself to write your strokes at a steady rhythm is great for noticing which words or sounds make you hesitate. You can find metronomes online or use an app on your phone, or just practice to music. One beat, one stroke. This is something that's easy enough that you could even do it for most of your practice.

Make a note of the words or phrases that you hesitate on. Shuffle the list and practice those a bunch of times.

You may find it useful to practice the same text multiple times: start at a comfortable speed and then set the metronome a little faster and repeat it until you can't keep up.

Finger Drills
Finger drills are a way of strengthening your fingers and training difficult finger positions. Stronger fingers can move faster and more accurately while remaining relaxed.

Finger drills involve a series of (usually two or three) chords that you alternate between, trying to do it perfectly 10-20 times. For instance:

You can do a bunch of these each day, either moving on to harder combinations or trying to increase the speed at which you can accurately do easier ones.

Readback
We don't seem to do this much in the open steno community, but reading back your raw steno to analyze your writing can be a powerful tool to find ways to improve. Often your mistakes are more regular than you think and you can find specific things to work on.

The Tapey Tape plugin logs your raw steno to a file along with the translations and is one of the most readable ways to look at your output.

Plover itself also has logging options that you can turn on, though these aren't as easily readable.

You can also open up Plover's paper tape window and save it to a file for later analysis.

Look for things like: are there specific words that you misstroke a lot? Are there vowels that you mix up? It may feel like your vowels are all over the place, but if you look carefully there may be some pairs that you confuse. Make up lists of words that use just a couple of vowels and drill them with Typey Type or Steno Jig.

Alternating Problem Words into Another Drill
For really focused practice on a single problem word, you can take another drill and insert your problem word before every word of the drill. Steno Jig has a feature to do this for you. You don't need a long drill: 100 words is plenty. It may seeem time consuming to do this for individual problem words, but do it once and you may never have trouble with that word again.

This and many other great ideas are discussed in more detail in Carol Jochim's Speedbuilding Tips article.

Write a Short Passage Perfectly
Try to write a short passage perfectly. Every single time you misstroke, make a note of the problem word and then go back to the beginning and start over. When you get to the end, take your list of problem words and drill them several times, then try the passage again. See if you can make it through three times in a row without a single mistake.

This is time consuming, so you may not want to do it often, but it's good practice occasionally, and will force you to make a list of things that you can't reliably stroke perfectly. If these are common words, then they're slowing down all of your writing.

Writing Blind
Take a text (news article, book, short story, etc.) and write out a chunk of it without looking at your output. Make your text editor very small and put it down in one corner of your screen, or use a word processor and set the text to be the same as the background color so you can't see it at all. Taking away that visual feedback forces you to rely on feel and to think about the shape of the chords, and you may find it dramatically improves your accuracy.