Robert Louis Stevenson - A Child's Garden of Verses ▶ ✔

Robert Louis Stevenson (born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson on 13 November 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland, died 3 December 1894 in Samoa) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. Stevenson suffered from serious bronchial trouble for most of his life but traveled widely despite his health issues.  He is best known for his works, Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, In the South Seas and A Child's Garden of Verses, the book that this section contains.

A Child's Garden of Verses is written from the perspective of a child, with generally simple use of language, rhythm and rhyme - which makes these poems great to use for practicing steno when one is just past the "I think I'm starting to get this" stage but not quite at the "omg I totally get this" stage!  

Text from Project Gutenberg, audio from Librivox  The images come from various editions of this book found on Gutenberg.org.

These poems range from as few as 22 words to as many as 357 words.  Completing all 50 poems is approximately 5,477 words.  The poems are organized, roughly speaking, from simpler/shorter poems to longer/more complex poems - they are not in the same order as in the original book.  The audio files are spoken at rates ranging from about 110wpm to 160wpm but all audio files have speed controls enabled so you can slow them down or speed them up.  All are StenoJig enabled so if the audio is too fast for you, you can practice with StenoJig and not fuss with trying to keep up with the audio!

Punctuation used in these poems are:

• Period . 
• Comma ,
• Exclamation !
• Question Mark ?
• Single quote ' ( -PBT, use AES for 's)
• Double quote " (Open KW-GS close KR-GS)
• Semi-colon ; 
• Colon :
• Hyphen - 
• Dash --  (Default stroke is TK-RB 
• Parentheses (Open PREPB close PR*EPB) 

Names/words not found in Plover's default dictionary:  You will need to create your own brief/outline in your user.json dictionary for these words (or fingerspell them):

• palanquin
• ne'er
• highland
• moil (to labor or toil)
• weir (a dam in a river used to raise the water behind it)
• whene'er
• whins
• sorrel
• divie

Words that may trip you up:  You won't find entries in your Plover dictionary for these words, but they all CAN be stroked thanks to the beauty of suffix strokes!  Some suffix strokes you'll find particularly useful in this section are ^en *EPB ^le *L ^ie AO*E  ^ies KWREUS

• paven 
• marten (a type of bird in the swallow family)
• wimple 
• leerie 
• gabies (simpletons or dunces)
• Bogie (a goblin or bugbear)
• quay (hint: "qua" "y")
• Malabar (hint: "mal" "a" "bar")
• kirk, eve, miller and laurel are in the dictionary but are capitalized (as proper names).
• You can create new entries for lowercase versions of these words or create a frustration buster stroke to retroactively lowercase the prior word stroked.  The dictionary entry for this is {*>} and you can set it to whatever stroke you want.  (I use KPA*D for this).
• FYI, the dictionary entry to retroactively capitalize a word is {*-|} (I use KPAD for this).

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