Over the past few months, I’ve found a couple of additional ways that I can edit more efficiently using a tablet. Essentially, if I can record the book in MP3 format, then I’m able to playback using the audio of the tablet. Where this becomes especially useful is where you have a word processor that runs on the tablet. Therefore you can take your editing with you anywhere, and because of this, your productivity and use of discretionary time really increases.
This is a blog entry I am dictating using a speech recognition program. Just as the tablet was a new feature a few months ago, the dictation software is now a new feature and has some potential of being used with writing. Now, it’s not especially surprising that a voice-recognition system is not going to be able to understand specialized terms found a book of science fiction fantasy. Another area that is giving me some specific concern regarding the dictation of fiction is the interruption of flow that’s required in order to put punctuation and the place. Unfortunately, you actually have to say the punctuation, or it just doesn’t show up. However, on the positive side, I’m happy to report that the speech recognition rate is extraordinarily high for normal run-of-the-mill vocabulary.
Another issue which immediately impresses me as being a bit of a hindrance to dictating fiction, is the interference that particular process has with the work of creating characters. For example it’s a lot easier to imagine a character’s voice if your own voice isn’t droning over the top of it. Now, that may not make a lot of sense in one regard, because you expect to be able to speak far faster than you could type. However, dictation means that you’re almost speaking perfect sentences, and writing isn’t like that to me. I may churn back and forth across a sentence multiple times and in multiple ways as I write it. It’s very difficult to do that with dictation, it seems. Therefore, the amount of time I spend right now dictating a blog entry is far more than I would if I actually typed it. However, in time this may improve.
Just as it wasn’t readily apparent exactly how the tablet was going to be useful for my editing and writing in the beginning, it’s hard to imagine that in my first few minutes of using this product I will be able to fully understand all the ways it can be used to help me with my writing.
See you in the future, James Todd Lewis