Right, Write, and a Live Feed to the Law Clerk
You are the realtime reporter for a three-day hearing on a contract assignment dispute. 'Right' will appear constantly - 'the right to assign,' 'right of first refusal' - and so will 'write,' because one exhibit is a set of written notices. Your dictionary translates a single stroke to 'right.' In the first hour you count roughly 40 instances of 'right' and 6 of 'write,' and you have already seen two wrong-word errors go out on the feed to the judge's law clerk. 'Its/it's' and 'principal/principle' are also live issues in the case. You cannot manually edit the feed at 220 wpm without falling behind and creating gaps.
1. How do you restructure the dictionary, and how do you choose between a context-dependent entry and a two-stroke distinction?
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Most CAT software will not reliably disambiguate a homophone from surrounding context, so plan on distinct outlines, not on the software being clever.
Assign the one-stroke brief to the higher-frequency word - 'right,' at roughly 40 to 6 - because that is where the stroke savings actually matter. Give 'write' a clearly different, longer outline that you drill before the afternoon session.
But note the asymmetry: the frequency argument optimizes speed, and the harm argument points the other way. A 'write of first refusal' in a rights case is a substantive error in a sentence the clerk may quote back at counsel. That asymmetry is why 'write' gets a deliberately distinctive outline rather than a near-miss of the 'right' stroke - near-misses are the errors you make at speed.
What you do not do is plan to fix it by hand at 220 wpm. Manual editing in a live feed costs you the next clause.
2. Two wrong-word errors are already on the clerk's screen. What do you do about them, and about its/it's and principal/principle?
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Disclose at the next break, briefly and without drama: 'Two instances in the first hour came out as write for right; here are the corrected passages.' A clerk reading 'write of first refusal' may misread the argument, and a silent correction later is worse than a prompt one. Log the errors and the correction in your job notes.
For its/it's and principal/principle, treat them as a different category: they are high-visibility in a contract case and they are cheap to control if you build the distinction before the words arrive. Assign distinct outlines, then at the break search the file for each and correct anything that slipped through.
The general principle: errors that change meaning get disclosed; errors that only look untidy get cleaned in scoping. 'Write' for 'right' changes meaning.
3. How would you have built the dictionary before the job started, given the same information?
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Start from the pleadings and exhibit list, not from the transcript. The dispute tells you which homophone pairs are live: assignment language guarantees right/write, and a set of written notices guarantees it again. Its/it's and principal/principle come straight off the face of the contract.
For each pair, decide which member takes the brief by frequency in the documents, and give the other a deliberately distinct outline.
Then test each pair inside a full sentence in a scratch file, not in isolation. Isolation tests translation; sentences test whether the outline is distinct enough to produce reliably at 220 wpm under pressure. A pair that looks fine on the dictionary screen and fails in a sentence will fail in the hearing.
Finally, keep the ambiguity list short. Five well-drilled distinctions beat twenty you have to think about.