on the cheap and sleazy side (www.cheapandsleazy.net)

By Priscilla Trillo and G.D. Warner

Little Words Machine Manual

If You Drop Little Words, You Need This.

 

Like many court reporters, Priscilla Trillo was experienced problems with little words: She would either hesitate, or just not hear them at all, resulting in errors in her transcripts that required later fixing.

To counteract this problem, she designed and coded Little Words Machine ... and no longer has problems with little words.

Even better, Priscilla has graciously allowed me to host the program here on ol' Cheap and Sleazy.

Enjoy!

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Once you have downloaded, decompressed and opened the Little Words Machine folder, you will find three items: This manual, Little Word Machine.exe, and the Big Chart of Prepositions.rtf. This document is -- more or less -- the manual you will find in the archive.

Little Words Machine Folder

The Little_Word_Machine

The Big Chart of Prepositions is a file containing the key strokes used in the Little Words Machine. "Maybe they will help you. Some are extremely helpful; others, less so," Priscilla says.

"It just gives me the confidence when writing that I can catch up if I need to write out a series of long words and then a bunch of short ones," she continued.

Little Words Machine

After the splash screen --

Little Words Machine Splash Screen

Little Words Machine Splash Screen

-- you should see a screen similar to this one:

Little Words Machine:  Ready!

Little Words Machine: Ready

First, type in the number of minutes you want to drill in the "Number of Minutes" space.

Next, type in the speed you want to drill ... and click the Start button.

Little Words Machine Running (No Steno Option)

Little Words Machine Running (No Steno Option)

As you can see, I have selected a one minute drill, at a nice, slow speed of 60 wpm.

Note that the WPM speed isn't an exact count of words, but of strokes -- for Priscilla, at least.

Also, since the number of words can vary between two and six, if you have "100" in the WPM box, you're probably writing at somewhere near 300 actual words a minute; possibly higher or lower.

Clicking the "Show Steno Below" checkbox shows the steno of what is on the screen:

Little Words Machine Working With Steno Option

Little Words Machine Working With Steno Option

Note that Priscilla has created a one-stroker for most of the word combinations that appear in Little Words Machine (Priscilla's theory started out as Roberts Walsh Gonzales theory, and she has been morphing it since her theory classes) ... and the Big Chart of Prepositions.rtf file is where the steno strokes can be found.

Priscilla recommends leaving this unchecked at first, by the way.

Summing Up

Running Little Words Machine is easy:

Questions? Updates? Feature Requests?

Send Priscilla Trillo an e-mail:

ilovesteno (at) sbcglobal (dot) net


About the Developer:

Priscilla Trillo has worked as an official reporter for the United Nations between 2004 and 2007. She has also taught court reporting school for several years. She wrote the Little Words Machine while taking a forced break due to chemo.


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