Sunday Salutations: The Dictation Episode
I hope everyone’s week went well. This week and likely for the next month or more I will be trying out dictation software. My blog post this Sunday is an edited version of my first attempt at dictation. You should be very grateful that it is edited! Oh, my. You should be so very, very grateful. Not because of issues with the software per se but just issues with me learning how to dictate. My question for the week is, for all my writer and non-writer friends, how many of you have tried dictation software and did you like it?
This Sunday Salutation is brought to you by Dictate from Microsoft 365. Yes, I gave in and switched to Windows because (1) I wanted to try dictation software and (2) because TextMaker appears to cap out at about 60K words with a few hundred comments which means a full manuscript does not work well in it.
Therefore, this weekend I am attempting to see if dictation will improve my writing speed. Or whether it will drag me down. It appears to be working fairly well for spelling and grammar, even with the basic Microsoft 365 Dictate, without even reading the directions… Yes, Tod and I are reversed a little on who reads directions before trying something. I do so once I have deemed it necessary.
At this point I am not entirely sure. I think in the long run, it will be a major time savings. Especially, if I learn to use the punctuation functions correctly or learn to breath correctly for the auto punctuation function to work. I also need to determine if I can dictate for long periods of time. Dictation definitely has a bonus of being able to spell whatever erratic verbiage that I contemplate throwing out at drop of a handkerchief, making it much more efficient for archaic verbiage and strange synonyms.
In addition to that dictation requires that I state my punctuation or use auto detect punctuation, which appears to adore a plethora of periods and disdain the comma. This is not something that I have been trained on, and therefore what and when the punctuation appears is erratic at best before editing. Therefore, I am learning to say what I want to say, how I want to say it, and remember to say the punctuation. Overall, that is better than needing to remember spelling, which has been my arch nemesis from grade school and beyond.
Another oddity about dictation is that I find that I am not gazing at the screen as much as when I type. Instead, aside from the asinine necessity of punctuation, I feel more connected to the words. This in and of itself is strange as I am self-conscious about dictating. It is awkward to talk to oneself and if it is not to oneself then it is awkward to for the people, I am living with hearing my stumbling attempts to put words to the page. I think of them hearing ragged breathing during a calm scene, the tentativeness in which I build a powerful phrase, or the jibber jabbering of ironing out jumbled thoughts (or as the diction called it “chipper chaffering blunders”).
However, I will overcome this self-consciousness. The same way I overcame self-consciousness in speech and debate — practice. It might take me a while. Yeah, at the same time it does appear to be faster for short blog posts and for brainstorming already. I think that there will come a time when even putting the whole story down by dictation will be easier for me.
I wonder if this is because talking is something that we do every day and therefore it’s just a new method of storytelling, conversing, and interacting? I can already tell my biggest problem is going to be punctuation. The long and the short of it is I need to read the directions. Tod wins on that!
On a last note, I would like to remind everyone another of our short stories was published this last week! Yay! New story! This makes three out currently. We can almost call ourselves real authors.
The latest one came out this Friday in paperback and Kindle. We are incredibly excited about this story even though it is a one off and not something that is going to go into our universe’s page at this point. This story in the Falcons of Malta anthology is called The Peace of Il-Maqluba, a spooky story of underground tunnels, a young Maltese couple and their bat familiar.
https://www.amazon.com/Falcons-Malta-Raconteur-Press-Anthologies-ebook/dp/B0C6WK752F
~Anna