Posted By: Redpen on 2008-10-11
In Reply to: Poll regarding listening ahead.......sm - LMT

I'm not sure what you mean by "listening ahead," but if it's the listening ahead mentioned elsewhere here as one of my recommendations, it does not mean you stop dead and listen, then rewind and type. It's not even listen-then-stop-and-type. That would be a waste of time, as well as unnecessary. It means that you listen to the upcoming dictation WHILE YOU TYPE what you just heard. You listen far enough ahead (about half a sentence) that you can understand the context and can catch changes. It is much more efficient to transcribe it correctly the first time. By listening ahead, you avoid typing the nonsensical material that typically results from listening and typing one word at a time. Older MTs working on typewriters with carbon packs with old Lanier transcribers that had no auto-backspace were forced to avoid any errors at all due to the difficulty in changing anything. Literally, the entire page would need to be retyped for anything more than a small error, and you did not want to be unrolling the carbon pack in order to scrape the errors off every page. (You had to use a scalpel or a very sharp knife.) You also had to listen far enough ahead to stop in a pause in the dictation, because every time you stopped, a few words would drop out between where you started to stop and where the tape finally got going again. When computers and digital transcribers came along, it was so easy to correct errors and so much easier to transcribe without those words falling out that MTs began learning to transcribe in an inefficient manner. Now, it's very common and it looks as though people are teaching it that way. I am not old enough to have learned on typewriters, but I did have the unhappy experience of having to use a ancient Lanier transcriber for a while. The light dawned on me when an employer installed an electronic document system that had no medical spellchecker, would not allow use of my productivity software, and which took an ridiculous amount of time to make even the smallest correction. It cut everyone's line counts in half. The facility did not adjust our productivity one whit to compensate. In self-defense, I decided to try to learn to listen way far ahead as I'd known some really ancient MTs to do and to type so slowly that I made NO errors and thus had to make no corrections. Within days, I had not only returned to my former productivity, but had increased it by 200-400 lines per hour . . . without an expander. I was typing at a leisurely, relaxed pace, too. A lot of MTs have tried this and most report that it helps them.

Reply By E-mail || Post QUICK reply        [ See Related Messages ]    [Vote/Moderate]

• Poll regarding listening ahead.......sm - LMT (Views: 225, 2008-10-10)
  • "Listening ahead" doe NOT mean "stopping." - Redpen
    • I Think I Listen Ahead - Michelle Anderson (Views: 36, 2008-10-14)
      • I didn't mean I stop and listen ahead.... sm - LMT (Views: 22, 2008-10-16)
    • Your experience is very interesting, Redpen SM - MsIndigo, aka InTheSameBoat (Views: 79, 2008-10-11)
  • NEVER - Emily Ayn (Views: 85, 2008-10-11)
  • Virtually never. Time spent doing that is time SM - MsIndigo, aka InTheSameBoat (Views: 145, 2008-10-10)