Write As You Speak? Or While You Speak?

I call this one “Ghost Writer.”
It was shot via Hipstamatic with the Salvador 84 lens and Rock BW-11 film, then processed in TTV PS and Noir. If you like this, definitely follow the 
Pinterest board of my iPhoneography for more image fun with iPhone apps.

Although some people are much better at verbalizing than writing, it’s just impractical to write in the same way that you speak. Ever since I heard that advice in grade school, I never thought it made good sense.

Now, if by “write like you speak” you mean “write clearly and to the point,” then yes, that is good advice. For anyone who has ever actually transcribed an interview or their own speech (go ahead and try it sometime) it’s very clear that the spoken word differs greatly from the written.

Catch A Dragon By the Tale

The whole reason I’m writing about this today – or rather, speaking  – is that I am dictating this via Dragon Dictation, the mind-blowing, powerful speech-to-text transcriber iPhone app. I’ve  used it for other posts in the past but not for one like this in its entirety. So if this prose seems rambling, that’s why. Before posting, I will have gone in and cleaned up some punctuation, added links, and added some graphics, but the bulk of this text has come to you first via audio. And I think that’s pretty amazing.

What do you think? Have you ever used Dragon Dictation or similar software? What’s your experience been like? Do you write as you speak, and do you think that’s good advice or not? Let us hear from you in the comments!

Related articles

• Thus Spake the Dragon: How Useful is Speech Recognition Software for Writers/Bloggers? (doingthewritething.wordpress.com)
• Nuance’s Dragon Drive! Hopes To Reshape In-Car Voice Systems(hothardware.com)
• Speak to Type: The Best Way to Blog (quickonlinetips.com)
• Free iPhone Apps (priconnects.wordpress.com)