Playing Detective

Did you ever play detective as a kid? I grew up playing/watching Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and reading Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown books, which admittedly were a bit before my time, but were some of the best reading material around, in my opinion. Doesn't everyone fancy themselves a gumshoe?

Once upon a time, my dad and I played actual detectives. I was probably 11 or so at the time, and we were out walking during the winter and somehow found a Wisconsin Heights High School class ring near our house in a snowbank.

There's Method(s) to My Briefing Madness

Source

Briefing on the fly is a very important skill that any court reporter or steno student needs to learn to be good at. It's essential for keeping up with speech above your current speed level. I think even Mark Kislingbury is a proponent of briefing on the fly. It's how he gets through his 300+ dictations, by briefing "gold bullion" as TKPWOUBL or whatever brilliant nonsense he might come up with.

To start off, what is briefing on the fly? It means you're making up a brief or phrase as you're writing for something that keeps coming up over and over, like a three-word place name or technical term or just a common word that you never thought to shorten before. There's a few methods, I'm sure, but I'm going to spell out a couple for you that I've been noticing I've been doing lately when creating new briefs.