by Irene Fontana, CSR, RPR, CMR. Santa Clara County Superior Court

• Know what's in your dictionary and regularly perform maintenance by removing outlines that are obsolete.
• Remove all defined conflicts in your dictionary. This is an editing tool and is not helpful in real-time, unless your software has "artificial intelligence" and chooses the correct word.
• Resolve conflicts in the following ways:
• Actual spelling of the word
• Delete a vowel
• Add a vowel
• Add an asterisk
• Plurals - come back on the second stroke
• Build words with prefix/root/suffix


• Use techniques that are easily remembered and make changes in groups
• e.g. PAT pat
• PA*T path?
• Use an asterisk for all "th" words


• Do not resolve conflicts by globalling groups of words together. This seldom works and will cause more conflicts in your writing.
• Always write hooked up to a computer and watch your writing. If you write an outline the "old way, " immediately rewrite it the new way.
• Do not work on more than one or two changes at a time.
• Use a Post-it on your machine to reinforce the new outline you are learning.
• As you write, visualize the text, putting in all hyphens, apostrophes, commas, periods, semicolons.
• Enter error correctors for consistently misstroked outlines unless they can be another word.
• Enter stacking errors unless they can be another word.
• e.g. TOG ~ing to TOD ~ed to
• Build your dictionary by entering commonly heard groups of words
• Cities
• States
• Street names
• Automobiles

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