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Thursday, February 15, 2018

Dragon for Writing Part 2

When I wrote Tuesday's blog post, my intention was to dip my toes in the water slowly when it came to composing with the Dragon voice recognition software. But I'd had a super bad writing day and hadn't come anywhere close on word count with the evening running late. I decided I had nothing to lose and jumped right in the deep end.

This isn't unprecedented, BTW. When I was in college, I had a journalism school professor tell us that we would be composing at the keyboard. Up until that time, I had been doing all my writing longhand and then entering it. I thought he was full of hooey.

Then I had this class to write short stories. Each story was required to be between 10 and 20 pages, and with all my other homework, I had nothing written the night before the paper was due. I knew I wouldn't be done by class if I wrote it longhand before typing it on my computer. There was only one option--compose at the keyboard.

To my great surprise, I loved it! The J-school professor wasn't full of hooey. I could compose at the keyboard!

With that memory fully in mind, I plugged in my microphone and started to speak my story into the computer. And surprise, surprise--it worked! I could do it!

Is it layered and nuanced? No. It's a very rough first draft quality of writing, but the gist of what I wanted to do is there and I managed to get a lot more words that I would have gotten typing--at least that's what I think going by my past writing experience. If I really hit a groove, I could produce that many words and more, but I haven't been in that groove in a long time now, so yeah, I think I got a lot more words than usual.

Did I like getting words? Hell, yes! Do I like how rough they are? No, but then everything I've been writing has been rough lately. I'm calling it a win.