Tips for Novices ... continued

Common errors.
Often, a beginner who is trying to find a particular letter will drive the display forwards fast while hunting for the letter. The rule of the road for Dasher users is just like that for car-drivers: don't drive forwards until you have identified where you want to go! So, after you have found the first letter of your sentence, and zoomed towards it, please SLOW DOWN and don't proceed any further into this first letter's square until you have figured out where you should be steering towards. Your next letter is there, immediately inside the first square you have entered. The letters are ordered alphabetically. If you can't see your letter, figure out where it must be on the basis of the letters you can see. Then point to the right place and enter the second letter's square.

Figure 1: writing 'I once had a whim'

Here is an example. Imagine you want to write 'I once had a whim'. You write 'I once ha...' and the Dasher display looks like figure 1. You want to write 'had'. What should you do? There are lots of letter ds on the screen, and all of them are rather small.

Figure 2: some alternative letter ds, with a beginner's error highlighted.

The five arrows in figure 2 show some of these ds. The purple arrow points to a d that we can't see yet, but we know it must be there because we can see 'a', 'b', and 'c' above it.

A common beginner's mistake is to keep rushing forward and spot any of these letter ds, and zoom into it. For example, figure 3 shows what happens if the user zooms towards the d marked by the top red arrow of figure 2.

Figure 3: selecting the wrong letter d.

If you go in this d, you are writing 'I once head...'. The other ds labelled by red arrows correspond to writing 'I once heard...' and 'I once hedge...'.

It is crucial to understand that there is only one correct d, namely the d that is immediately inside the blue box corresponding to letter `a' in the sequence 'I once ha'. That blue box is highlighted in figure 4.

Figure 4: the correct letter d is the one marked by the green arrow. This example illustrates the rule "always keep going inside the box that you want" -- in this case, the blue box associated with the letter a of the word 'had'.

If you ever leave that blue box (as we did in figure 3) then we lose the letter 'a'.

Yet more tips for beginners...