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Speed Up Pads

 These Speed Up Pad downloads are a variation of facility drill, using single line length sentences. Please see blog article for February 2017 for description.

You will benefit from making the effort to go faster whilst maintaining neat outlines, without bothering to time or calculate the speed. Constantly timing yourself can harm progress, as it can become a distraction in itself, but is useful as an occasional check on progress.

First practice one sentence on your normal pad to become familiar with it. Using the Speed Up pad, fill in the lines going at a reasonable pace to maintain neat outlines, not slow drawing and not fast disintegrating outlines. If you wish to test your speed, fill in as many of the ten lines as possible against a one-minute timer. Read off from the figures in the margin how many words you have written, to get your word-per-minute figure. If you finish the ten lines before the minute is up, go back and write over the top of the first lines.

Alternatively, fill in all ten lines, and record how long that took in seconds. Calculate your speed as follows: words divided by seconds, times 60:

e.g. if you took 125 seconds to write ten 15-word lines, that would be:

150/125 X 60 = 70 wpm

Facility drill pads should not be treated as precious, but printed/prepared, filled up and thrown away as quickly as possible. The simplest method is to punch one hole top left of the cut A5 pages, and tie very loosely with a string, yarn etc, leaving a large loop so that pages can be turned. As this is not dictation, the pages do not have to turn "nicely" like your spiral bound pads. You can use up the plain backs with single outline drilling, or the "eyes closed" method of writing from spoken matter (which principally practises recall of outlines) where you do not need lines.

You can also just print the end page that repeats all the text of the sentences, and use those to make up drill pages on your normal shorthand pad.

The Blank Pad page is for you to make up your own sentences, necessary if you are in the beginning stages and have a limited vocabulary of outlines at present. Copy out 15-word chunks of the text in the exercises in your instruction book.

As most of the Speed Up Pads are edited versions of blog sentences, you cannot use the blog dictation files with them, but the original blogs do give explanatory notes on outlines.

Sample A5 page

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