This has been a busy writing week for me. I'm getting ready to attend the Muse and the Marketplace writing conference, put on by Boston's Grub Street, this Saturday. I've participated at the conference the past two years and have gotten a lot of value out of it. I blogged about last year's conference here.
I've also been working on my second novel for quite a while and recently finished my first draft. The catch is that about two-thirds of the book is still contained in four notebooks written in longhand. I am very pumped to get ALL of the text into my PC, but this will keep me busy for quite a while. Recently, one of my writing friends told me that she'd been having good luck working with the Dragon Naturally Speaking software from Nuance. Aha. Possibly a way forward which might give my typing fingers a break. So, I'm trying it.
I opened up the package this past weekend and loaded it onto my laptop. That part was simple. The next step was to find the time to get my user profile established. Since the software needs to recognize your speech and then turn it into text, tuning it to your individual speech is essential, or so it seems. The first time, I worked on getting the profile established. This was relatively painless. The software wanted me to read a few text selections, which included excerpts from John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech. That part was fun, though they cut me off before the exhortation concerning what you should do for your country. They also wanted to get samples of content from my hard drive. Hmm. I let them go ahead. Finally, the profile was done.
Next, putting the software to work. On the first night, I fumbled around and spent a lot of time making manual corrections. One annoying thing was that Microsoft Word uses curly quotation marks by default and Naturally Speaking uses the generic type. I did an online lookup and the consensus seems to be that editors don't care which one is used. However, a mix of the two is distracting, so that'll need to be resolved down the road. My first attempt to turn the curly quotes off didn't manage to penetrate the fog of Word's autocorrect logic. Anyhow, after an hour or so, I'd moved about 430 words to my PC. Okay, but hardly a breakthrough.
The next night I tried again. This time I was more persistent and started reading longer stretches of text. The results were encouraging. The software did seem to be making adjustments and I had many fewer corrections than on the prior night. Despite various distractions in the background -- the current broadcast of American Idol -- I kept at it. The results: 2300 words in about 2 hours. I was pleased.
Two days into the experiment, I'm enthusiastic about the possibilities for this software to accelerate how quickly I can turn my hard copy into editable PC-based text. I'm still learning more about the software -- for example, on it's correction features -- but it's already getting me thinking about how using this tool might change my writing process for the better. I'll keep at it and report back on this blog as I gain more experience.