Briefs vs. Writing Out
By Jennifer M. Bonfilio, RMR-CBC-CCP
There has been much discussion regarding briefing vs. writing out. Here is my take on the issue as it relates to captioning:
My strong belief is a good captioner ought to be able to write anything and everything out. Of course, that does not mean never using briefs. It means having the ability to write anything thrown at you. I try very hard to use briefs as a tool and not a crutch. I think too many captioners, upon hearing a new word or name, immediately create a brief for it. Yes, you must hesitate because your brain cannot possibly process that information so quickly given the number of briefs some people use and create every day. If you caption based on the prefix-root word-suffix principle, there is very little hesitation because you are simply stroking out the phonetic outlines. That’s not to say there is never hesitation, of course. Some strokes are simply harder to execute than others. I have to think as I’m stroking every stroke whether it will cause a conflict, whether I am stroking it accurately, etc.; however, in my experience, it becomes second nature, just as it does when you use a certain brief every day several times a day. In other words, I no longer have to hesitate when I write BREAK v. BRAKE, as I did years ago. But I hesitate every single time I have to write KARAT v. CARAT. I have that one up on a dry erase board that I refer to because I just can’t remember the difference.
When the U.S. first attacked Afghanistan, I wrote AF/GAN/STAN over and over and over for a good month or two before deciding it was “briefworthy” in my mind. It came up so often that the brief was adopted quickly, and I still use it today without hesitation. The problem, in my mind, is if a captioner is accustomed to creating briefs immediately, what happens when they have to write something out over and over without benefit of a commercial break, say? During the Olympics while captioning hockey, there were no commercials for 40 minutes! I had briefs for most players, but there were some names entered (Finnish!) completely off from their pronunciation or I neglected to global together a first and last name where the first name was MARI (sounds like Mary) and it wasn’t translating properly….all things common to me in the first period, quarter, inning, etc. of a sporting event, all things normally remedied during the first few commercial breaks. I did not have benefit of commercials. I had to fingerspell and improvise. I am able to do that because I have developed the skill to write anything. I’m not perfect, mind you, and I still make mistakes, but I can handle just about anything. If I “forgot” to load the Finnish hockey dictionary and discovered none of my briefs were working, I could have (painstakingly of course) written every name out. I wonder if captioners who rely so heavily on briefs could do that.
And if you think my examples are farfetched, believe me, they are not. I’ve had many unfortunate things happen while on air that were less than ideal.
You can misstroke briefs just as easily as multiple strokes. The benefit of the latter is, if you have a good realtime theory and utilize prefixes and suffixes, your misstroke is more likely to be readable.
The biggest benefit of not briefing as much is outlined in the following scenario:
You caption a local newscast every day, and every day they do a traffic report that is way beyond a comfortable speed. You continue each day to buckle down and write the hell out of that traffic report, editing (dropping) wherever possible, at the same time maintaining an acceptable quality level. You do not come up with briefs for every three-syllable road, highway, city name, etc. You keep plugging away at the multi-stroke words. Before you know it, not only are you editing less, but your speed has *increased* because of the daily *practice* as it were, at a challenging piece.
What I do is write everything out, and when I struggle with the same word each day, if I keep misstroking it, then I come up with a nice brief to help me out, but only after I’ve attempted to write it out for a good period of time.
Ok, ok, still with me? Here’s the benefit I was talking about. One day you are asked to caption a show you do not do on a regular basis; therefore, you’ve not had the opportunity to *practice* that show’s particularly challenging segments. All of a sudden, you’re faced with a, oh, what the heck, traffic report. I guarantee you if you become accustomed to briefing a lot, you will never get your feet off the ground. It will be over before you started, and you’ll be like, What happened?! It will be extremely difficult to get a rhythm going because you won’t *know how* to stroke out unfamiliar words, or better said, unfamiliar combinations of words.
Forcing yourself to write things out allows you to get in a zone, get in a rhythm that will definitely benefit you in the long run.