This post takes a fresh look at the August 2022 YouTube Exam Series video entitled "120wpm - 60wpm (same groupings as Resignations at the Parish Council)."

If you recall, this one was the third in the series that began with the "Resignations at the Parish Council" and continued on with "Resignations at the Parish Council - Part II." 

Here, we have a passage of 240 words. It is dictated for three minutes at 80. And then for two minutes at 120 words per minute, and of course, you have the choice as to which speed you attempt first.

We'll refer to this passage as "I Am Here As A Member Of The Borough Council."

The whole passage contains twenty nine word groupings, sixteen of which were included in the last two videos (Resignations and Resignations Part II).

In Resignations - Part II, we concentrated very specifically on the second half of that passage; five sentences in total which was dictated at 120.

By the time we had looked at that in depth, of course, you were likely very familiar with the content. So, this passage will define whether you are ready to meet those same groupings, but in a different context.

So, the suggestion would be to take the dictation in whichever order you prefer; 120 first, 80 second, or the opposite way round. And then have a look at the long hand as shown with those word groupings in red and green.

You can head straight to the dictation on Soundcloud here:

Variations On Resignations At Borough Council- 120 WPM

Variations On Resignations At Borough Council- 80 WPM

To finish off, the passage will be read for (2+2) minutes at 60 WPM, although with the midpoint being 120 words, we are mid sentence. So in the first half, I will dictate to the end of that sentence which is an extra nine words making 129 words. So the second half will be slightly shorter at 111 words, but the timing will be spot on at one word per second.

Variations On Resignations At Borough Council- 60 WPM

If you are transcribing the full 240 words after, you have a maximum of 24 minutes to do it, so you can time yourself and then check your transcription.

Finally, check to see how many of the word groupings are contained in YOUR shorthand vs. that which is presented below. Hopefully, all that we have gone over so thoroughly in the last two videos will have been utilised and you will have remembered many of the extra ones because I've chosen ones that are very familiar and have cropped up many times before.

If you haven't familiarised yourself with the word groupings in the original mock exam "Resignations at the Parish Council," take 13 minutes to watch our Word Groupings video entitled "Resignations at the Parish Council - Words & Groupings" so you can catch up.

In addition to the longhand (with all of the various word groupings in either red or green), we've included some text analysis. Over 90% of the words in this passage are in the Top 1000 NGSL list! See the discussion below for more detail.

The New General Service List (NGSL), developed by Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips in 2013, is a list of 2,801 words which comprise the most important high-frequency words in English, giving the highest possible coverage with the fewest possible words. Although there are over 600,000 words in English, the 2,801 words of the NGSL give over 90% coverage. The NGSL was created using a 273 million word subsection of the two billion word Cambridge English Corpus, meaning its corpus was over 100 times as large as that used for the original General Service List (GSL).

The New Academic Word List (NAWL), developed by Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips in 2013, is a list of 963 words which frequently appear in academic texts, but which are not contained in the New General Service List (NGSL). The NAWL was developed based on a study of a 288 million word academic corpus, consisting of academic journals, non-fiction, student essays, academic discourse, and best-selling academic textbooks.

Word lists for the “I Am Here As A Member Of The Borough Council.”

The following analysis identifies the words used in this mock examination and sorts them by frequency. Based on the research, the NGSL list shows that 2,801 words (out of more than the 600,000 words in the English language) cover more than 90% of the words you are likely to come across in books, newspaper articles, movies and/or television. It pays to know them well.

‍NGSL Top 1k words (1-1,000): a, about, action, after, against, ago, am, and, another, are, as, at, be, because, been, business, caught, cleaning, come, cost, decided, dog, down, dropping, end, even, fact, feel, few, fine, fined, fines, first, for, hard, hardest, has, have, here, hit, holiday, I, in, is, issue, issued, it, know, last, less, lot, make, mean, member, moment, months, more, must, no, not, notice, number, of, off, on, one, order, our, over, particular, people, pleased, possible, pounds, problem, public, raise, raising, realise, say, seem, soon, step, summer, take, talk, than, that, the, their, there, these, they, think, thinking, this, those, time, to, up, walk, way, we, week, were, when, who, will, years, you

NGSL Top 2k words (1,001-2,000): amazed, committed, council, double, path, pocket, solve

NGSL Top 3k words (2,001 +): acceptable, offence

New Academic Word List (NAWL) words: None

Supplemental words: hundred, seventy, two

Off-list (not on the NGSL or the NAWL): borough, deterrent, incurs, litter, toilet, wardens