[CW] Copying CW

[Donald Chester]

>From: "David J. Ring Jr - N1EA" <n1ea@arrl.net>
,
>
>You're going to run into TWO SCHOOLS of thought in this subject.
>
>One school will say that if you don't hear "letter" by "letter", you will
>never be able to really copy code - you will start imagining what you hear,
>and think you're copying.  Also by guessing, you will probably think that
>errors are ok, because the other person will only be guessing also.

This is exactly what happens with oral communication.  You would be 
surprised how much you miss when you listen to another person speak.  You 
subconsciously fill in the gaps through context clues.  This often leads to 
misunderstanding, but has always been part of human speech.

I recall once, when I was living in France back in the 70's, a friend who 
was an avid George Harrison fan asked for help with one of his songs.  She 
had a 45 rpm record of "Deep Blue."  Although she had studied English for 
several years, she could understand only some of it, and asked me to 
transcribe the words for her.  Just listening to the song, I thought I 
understood all the lyrics.  But with pencil and paper, I tried to write them 
down word for word.  I was amazed at how much of the song was 
incomprehensible, due to the singer slurring his words, and the noise of the 
instruments in the background.  My "transcript" was full of holes.  My 
friend had understood much more than she thought, but not being 100% 
familiar with the language, she lacked the context clues to fill in many of 
the words she had been missing.

With CW, it depends on what kind of communicating you are doing.  If you are 
relaying a message, or copying text, naturally you need to copy every word, 
100%.  But if you are just enjoying a ragchew over the air, the conversation 
is likely to be pretty trivial, so head copying is perfectly adequate, and 
you would probably miss just as much in a casual face-to-face conversation.  
If you are conversing about something of grave importance, better bring 
along a tape recorder.

Don K4KYV

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail