Just because you can turn word combinations into briefs doesn’t mean you should.
Briefs exist for a reason. You want briefs for common words. A single word you hear a thousand times should write in one stroke. That makes sense.
The outlines below are Magnum briefs. They’re the gifts that keep on giving while leaving me mystified.
They are brief phrases. Common two-word phrases. Three-word questions. Phrases built from words you already brief individually. If you already write “not” in one stroke and “yet” in one stroke, what problem does TKPWHRET solve?
I don’t think we can afford to be more confused.
TKPWHR- alone will plunge you into a magical misstroke wonderland minus Earth, Wind & Fire’s boogie.
Yes, I get it. It’s “clever” to smash the outlines for “not” and “yet” together, but does that mean you should?
It’s like alphabetizing your spice rack, then alphabetizing your silverware drawer, then alphabetizing your socks before they go into the hamper. You could, but should you?
If you’re writing the individual words easily — and every word in these phrases is easy — you’d never think to phrase them. “Not yet.” “At this.” “Has it been.”
Just write “not,” write “yet,” and move on. You’ve got better things to do.
The idea that these phrases need their own outlines only makes sense inside a paradigm that says brief everything, which is a very bad idea, and something you’d never think to do on your own. Unless someone made you.
“Not Yet”
The brief: TKPWHRET.
Say “not yet” out loud. Now look at TKPWHRET.
If you didn’t already know what that was supposed to be, could you read it? Would you want to?
It’s an outline held in place by raw memorization.
You can write TPHOT/KWR-T, or, like I do, -PB/KWR-T. Two strokes. Both obvious the first time you see them if you write “not” as -PB.
All that for TKPWHRET — the drilling, the repetition, the flashcards — solves a problem that doesn’t exist.
“When Is It” / “Where Is It”
Two different questions. Two briefs:
STWH and STWR.
Both are fingering nightmares. If you stare into these long enough, you’ll see Freddy Krueger. They ain’t pretty.
Better hope your fingers don’t stay like that.
The entire difference is one key. H versus R.
Under real-time dictation — attorney rattling off questions, witness stepping on answers — you’re selecting between two four-key outlines that differ by a single character.
You drilled these. You practiced them. You built flashcards for them. All that work, and none of it solves a real problem. It just drills you back harder.
You can write “when is it” phonetically: WH-/-S/T-. You can write “where is it” phonetically: W-R/-S/T-. Clean strokes, obvious sounds, zero memorization. The problem these briefs are solving doesn’t exist.
“At This”
T-TSDZ.
Now, that’s quite the lopsided monkey.
Why would you do this?
The right pinky extending outward to hit the inside crack position between four keys.
Does it make a horn sound if you get it right? What’s the payout?
A fingering and misstroke nightmare.
You need to write without thinking.
T-TSDZ requires thinking. You memorized this. You drilled it. You built a neural pathway for it. And all that effort protects you from nothing. Not even the bad dreams.
You can write AT/TH-. Two clean strokes, both phonetic, both obvious, zero memorization. The problem T-TSDZ solves doesn’t exist.
The “Has It” Problem
“Has it” = SHA*T
“Has it been” = SHA*BT
“Has the” = SHAT
You’re kidding me, right? This looks like the past tense of eating bad clams.
Three briefs. The only thing separating them is an asterisk and a B.
SHAT means “has the.”
Not on your best day.
SHA*T means “has it.” One asterisk apart. SHA*BT means “has it been” — one extra key tacked onto “has it.” These three live in adjacent memory slots.
The entire problem these briefs create is unnecessary. Write “has” HA if you want. Forget the rest. The garbageman is coming at 10.
“Did You Have an Opportunity To”
“Did you have an” = TK*UFPB
“Did you have an opportunity” = TKP*UFPB
“Did you have an opportunity to” = TKP*UFPBT
Three briefs. Each one is the previous brief plus one key. Each one requires you to predict how far the attorney is going to go before you commit your fingers.
And the two longer versions open with TKP- — left ring finger spanning top and bottom rows while left middle fires alongside it. That’s a demanding physical pattern before the mental work even starts.
Every hour you spend drilling these three briefs is an hour spent building a problem you didn’t need to have.
What the Six Entries Have in Common
Every one of them is pointless.
Good luck hitting these cleanly when you’re exhausted. My jobs are 350-500 pages long, 9 AM to past 6 PM. Get it?
Every one of them has a phonetic alternative that requires no memorization, no prediction, no drilling, and no flashcards. The phonetic version is right there. It always was.
The briefs don’t solve a problem. They create one — then ask you to spend hundreds of hours training your way through it.
The Load
“Not yet.” “Has it been.” “When is it.” “Did you have an opportunity to.” These aren’t exotic vocabulary. They aren’t medical terms or legal citations. They are common phrases in testimony — plain English, short words, simple sounds. And the ones you should be writing the MOST RELIABLY without thinking or hesitating.
Every one of them writes phonetically in clean, obvious strokes with zero memorization. And every one of them was turned into an arbitrary code that requires drilling, prediction, and pattern sorting under fatigue. The briefs that are supposed to save you the most time are the ones that created the most unnecessary work.
That’s not a practice problem. That’s a design problem — built before anyone measured what these briefs actually cost the human brain to execute under sustained, real-world conditions.
There’s a difference between SMART and WISE. Just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD.
And these, you definitely SHOULDN’T (SHAO).