Day 787: Dictation, day 4
I guess my daily writing blog has become filled with dictation and my experiences with it. I have also found it helpful to dictate my thoughts on some of the dictation books I’ve been reading (or re-reading). This is the book I read last night:
15-Minute Dictation by Sean Platt and Neeve Silver
It's a nice, short book.
I like the fact that he addresses the problem of rewiring your brain, which was the aspect of dictation that I was having the most problems with. He addresses that this rewiring process requires consistency, doing dictation every day for a few weeks to get more used to it.
Here's a quote:
“Fortunately, you already know how to talk. And you already know how to tell stories. Think of them as two train stations in your brain. We're going to lay track in between them to forge a permanent connection that makes it easier for you to talk your stories.” Page 55
Like other dictation books, he recommends practicing dictation with other things besides your book. The book gives exercises, and he also suggests reading an article or story that someone else wrote. It will help you get used to the punctuation and commands, and also get you used to how to use your transcription tool.
When you’re ready to move to dictating fiction, he suggests that instead of using your work in progress, that you dictate a new short story or something else. It makes the project low stress, which will help with practicing dictation.
It made me think that if you have a book with some of your favorite prompts, you can use that for dictation practice exercises. One of my favorite prompt books is Pen On Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide To Igniting The Writer Within by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, and I realized that I could use those prompts to practice dictation. Those prompts would probably be good warm-up drills.
He says that his outlining changes if he's going to dictate a story versus typing it. I'm not sure if that's true for me, although I'm only a few days into this dictation. He says that when he outlines stories for typing, he'll add more detail, whereas if he's dictating, his outline will be more sparse. I don't know if I could personally dictate fiction with a more sparse outline, because I have a very difficult time writing if my outline is not detailed enough.
He recommends having your outline for your beats with you at all times so that you can dictate in small pockets of time that you may find during the day. That seems like an obvious piece of advice, but it's not something I had thought of, since I'm not used to carrying my outline with me all the time. But he makes the point that as you get more used to dictation, you will find yourself able to dictate in small pockets of time throughout the day, and to do work on your manuscript, you will need to have your outline with you.
He basically suggests that you dictate for 15 minutes every day for four weeks, and by the end you will have become more used to dictation and it will become more comfortable. He says that 15 minutes a day, for four weeks is enough to be able to retrain your brain so that you can dictate your fiction rather than typing it. He makes the point that 15 minutes is not a very long time, and it is not as hard to commit to only 15 minutes of doing something awkward and uncomfortable every day.
He also makes sure to emphasize that you need to slow down when you are dictating your book. This is similar to what other dictation books have mentioned, but I remember a better explanation in the book Fool Proof Dictation: A No-Nonsense System for Effective & Rewarding Dictation by Christopher Downing, so I will try to blog about that another time. Suffice it to say, dictation requires you to slow down your speaking speed.
He also mentions a couple times that the transcription program skips right over pauses and blank space in the recording, so when you pause to think, it's really not that big a deal. If you don't have to worry about pauses and the silence, it reduces the stress associated with dictation.
As with some other dictation books and some podcasts I've listened to about dictation, he also recommends that you do your first edit of the transcription on the same day that you dictated it. He says that it's easier to be able to figure out missing or mistaken words if you edit it on the same day. I can totally understand that.
The book had a couple things that were different, but the majority of things were already mentioned in Dictate Your Book: How To Write Your Book Faster, Better, and Smarter by Monica Leonelle, so it wasn’t all that new to me. And I think Dictate Your Book had more information about mindset and more detail in her practical advice.
*
I blogged a few days ago about doing batching, because I read about it in the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. At the time I decided to simplify my writing tasks for each day, so that I have the minimum number of frogs to do before my writing, and my writing is only one project. Since I stopped doing 100 words in my Hawaii book every day, I changed it so that I worked on the Hawaii book on Thursdays, since I tend to have a lot of house tours on that day.
But this weekend I realized that in actuality, I have more interruptions and distractions on Saturdays. Since I don't have to write as many words when I work on my Hawaii book, I can get away with working fewer hours on the book on that day, so I decided to switch to doing my Hawaii book on Saturdays.
It will still be a little difficult doing my Regency book on Thursdays, because I will still be very busy, but I'm going to try to rearrange some other house chores so that I have as few of them to do on Thursdays as possible.
I’m not feeling all that great right now because I had bad IBS last night, and I’m still feeling a bit of pain and discomfort today. I got a late start because of the IBS, and while I wondered if I should skip my “frogs” and just start on the writing, the IBS was too uncomfortable for me to concentrate on fiction anyway, so I opted to do my “frogs.”
I started feeling better later in the day and finally got started on my writing.
I started off doing the “cycling” edits on the words I finished cleaning up yesterday (which I had dictated the day before).
Yesterday, I did some more dictation and transcribed the recording, but I hadn’t had time to do the clean-up edit on that at the time, so I decided to do the clean-up editing now.
I know it’s important to train my Dragon program to improve accuracy, but I’m too lazy to do it within Dragon right when I transcribe the recording. Instead, as I’m editing the transcription in 4thewords or Scrivener, as I come across mistakes, I make a list of words to correct in Dragon so I can do it later.
After cleaning up the dictation from yesterday, I ended up with 851 usable words. The raw dictation was 1192 words. The dictation had taken 42 minutes, transcription took 49 minutes (although I was doing other things at the time rather than sitting at the computer), and editing the raw dictation took 25 minutes.
If I include the time for transcription, my words per hour was 441. If I exclude the transcription time, my words per hour was 765. That is about the same as my current average when I type and edit as I go
After I finished editing the dictation from yesterday, it was already rather late in the day and I had to start cooking dinner. However, I still have not written any new words today.
I considered just doing the bare minimum of 100 words, but I wanted to get more writing done than that. I started cooking and found I had about 30 minutes while waiting for my soup to cook.
I considered just writing using my keyboard, but then I decided to do dictation since I have been trying to get better at it this week. I took my digital recorder and went into the backyard and did about half an hour of dictation. Strangely, my backyard was more noisy than if I had gone out on the street, because even though the street has cars passing, my backyard is noisy with the sounds of the neighbors' dogs.
The dictation was again awkward and slow, and I didn't feel that it was flowing particularly well. But I was satisfied that I worked for a solid 30 minutes dictating my book, and since I was outside, I was not distracted. Lately, I have not been as distracted by my computer, but I have found that I can be easily distracted by things around the house. Being outside helped me to be able to focus much more intently, although I was worried a bit about the recording because of the dog barking.
This also reminds me of how when I did dictation while out on a walk, I was forced to work more intently because I was away from home and there wasn’t anything else I could do (unless I totally ditched my dictation and instead listened to music or an audiobook on my phone, but the dictation wasn’t so hard that I was ready to do that). The walking outside really makes me more efficient and productive than when I’m at my computer. I might not be distracted by Facebook or Twitter, but I’m certainly distracted by things to do around the house.
The only problem with my dictation today is that I had to do the clean-up edit after dinner, so I ended up working a bit late. I also ended up skipping the reading I usually do after dinner, which is necessary for me to refill my creative well. I can skip it a few times a week, but if I skip it too much, then I find my writing suffers or I just feel too unmotivated to want to work.
My raw dictation was 1085 words, in 27 minutes. Transcription took 12 minutes (I sat at my computer this time to time it). Clean-up editing took 22 minutes, and I ended up with a total of 955 usable words. If I include the transcription time, my words per hour rate was 943 words per hour, which is rather good. If I don’t include the transcription time, my words per hour rate was 1175 words per hour. However, I’m tempted not to discount the transcription time, even if I can do other things while it’s going on, because I can’t use my computer while Dragon is transcribing (since my computer is so old and slows to a crawl when Dragon is up and running).
So the final words per hour rate today, which includes dictation, transcription and clean-up editing, was 943 words per hour, which is a little bit better than my average when I type and edit as I go.
However, I also noticed that my words per hour speed just during the dictation is getting faster, so I might be getting better at it. I didn’t record the raw dictation speed on July 25th, when I first started dictation, but my raw dictation words per hour rates have been 1558 (on the 26th), 1703 (yesterday), and 2411 (today). Hopefully I can get better and faster at dictating, although I don’t want the dictation to be so messy that editing takes even longer.
I hope I can get back onto a better rhythm tomorrow, now that I no longer have any more raw dictation words that need clean-up. I’ll only need to do my normal cycling edit before I start my dictation tomorrow. I’m going to try to dictate on a walk in the afternoon.
So far, transcription and clean-up editing time combined is about the same as dictation time, so I have to remember that however long I do dictation tomorrow, I have to allot an equal amount of time for transcription and clean-up editing, so that I don’t have to do the clean-up editing the next day.
Writing streak: 266 days
Regency series:
Editing: Time spent: 53 minutes (this is cycling editing of the words I wrote 2 days ago, but not yesterday’s words)
Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 27 minutes (this is clean-up editing of the words I wrote yesterday as well as dictation, transcription, and clean-up editing of the words I wrote today)
Writing: Total number of words: 1806 words (this is the cleaned up, usable words from both yesterday and today)
Writing-related business:
Regency research reading: time spent: 25 minutes
Email: time spent: 14 minutes
Marketing: time spent: 32 minutes
My takeaway for today: I know it’s important to train my Dragon program to improve accuracy, but I’m too lazy to do it within Dragon right when I transcribe the recording. Instead, as I’m editing the transcription in 4thewords or Scrivener, as I come across mistakes, I make a list of words to correct in Dragon so I can do it later.
My second takeaway for today: When I am outside dictating, I am much less likely to be distracted. Also, when I go walking, I have no choice but to dictate for the full time I am gone, so I am forced to focus more intently. The walking outside really makes me more efficient and productive than when I’m at my computer.
My third takeaway for today: My raw dictation words per hour rate seems to be increasing over the 3 days I’ve been recording it. Hopefully I can get better and faster at dictating, although I don’t want the dictation to be so messy that editing takes even longer.
My fourth takeaway for today: So far, transcription and clean-up editing time combined is about the same as dictation time, so I have to remember that however long I do dictation, I have to allot an equal amount of time for transcription and clean-up editing, so that I don’t have to do the clean-up editing the next day.
It's a nice, short book.
I like the fact that he addresses the problem of rewiring your brain, which was the aspect of dictation that I was having the most problems with. He addresses that this rewiring process requires consistency, doing dictation every day for a few weeks to get more used to it.
Here's a quote:
“Fortunately, you already know how to talk. And you already know how to tell stories. Think of them as two train stations in your brain. We're going to lay track in between them to forge a permanent connection that makes it easier for you to talk your stories.” Page 55
Like other dictation books, he recommends practicing dictation with other things besides your book. The book gives exercises, and he also suggests reading an article or story that someone else wrote. It will help you get used to the punctuation and commands, and also get you used to how to use your transcription tool.
When you’re ready to move to dictating fiction, he suggests that instead of using your work in progress, that you dictate a new short story or something else. It makes the project low stress, which will help with practicing dictation.
It made me think that if you have a book with some of your favorite prompts, you can use that for dictation practice exercises. One of my favorite prompt books is Pen On Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide To Igniting The Writer Within by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, and I realized that I could use those prompts to practice dictation. Those prompts would probably be good warm-up drills.
He says that his outlining changes if he's going to dictate a story versus typing it. I'm not sure if that's true for me, although I'm only a few days into this dictation. He says that when he outlines stories for typing, he'll add more detail, whereas if he's dictating, his outline will be more sparse. I don't know if I could personally dictate fiction with a more sparse outline, because I have a very difficult time writing if my outline is not detailed enough.
He recommends having your outline for your beats with you at all times so that you can dictate in small pockets of time that you may find during the day. That seems like an obvious piece of advice, but it's not something I had thought of, since I'm not used to carrying my outline with me all the time. But he makes the point that as you get more used to dictation, you will find yourself able to dictate in small pockets of time throughout the day, and to do work on your manuscript, you will need to have your outline with you.
He basically suggests that you dictate for 15 minutes every day for four weeks, and by the end you will have become more used to dictation and it will become more comfortable. He says that 15 minutes a day, for four weeks is enough to be able to retrain your brain so that you can dictate your fiction rather than typing it. He makes the point that 15 minutes is not a very long time, and it is not as hard to commit to only 15 minutes of doing something awkward and uncomfortable every day.
He also makes sure to emphasize that you need to slow down when you are dictating your book. This is similar to what other dictation books have mentioned, but I remember a better explanation in the book Fool Proof Dictation: A No-Nonsense System for Effective & Rewarding Dictation by Christopher Downing, so I will try to blog about that another time. Suffice it to say, dictation requires you to slow down your speaking speed.
He also mentions a couple times that the transcription program skips right over pauses and blank space in the recording, so when you pause to think, it's really not that big a deal. If you don't have to worry about pauses and the silence, it reduces the stress associated with dictation.
As with some other dictation books and some podcasts I've listened to about dictation, he also recommends that you do your first edit of the transcription on the same day that you dictated it. He says that it's easier to be able to figure out missing or mistaken words if you edit it on the same day. I can totally understand that.
The book had a couple things that were different, but the majority of things were already mentioned in Dictate Your Book: How To Write Your Book Faster, Better, and Smarter by Monica Leonelle, so it wasn’t all that new to me. And I think Dictate Your Book had more information about mindset and more detail in her practical advice.
*
I blogged a few days ago about doing batching, because I read about it in the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. At the time I decided to simplify my writing tasks for each day, so that I have the minimum number of frogs to do before my writing, and my writing is only one project. Since I stopped doing 100 words in my Hawaii book every day, I changed it so that I worked on the Hawaii book on Thursdays, since I tend to have a lot of house tours on that day.
But this weekend I realized that in actuality, I have more interruptions and distractions on Saturdays. Since I don't have to write as many words when I work on my Hawaii book, I can get away with working fewer hours on the book on that day, so I decided to switch to doing my Hawaii book on Saturdays.
It will still be a little difficult doing my Regency book on Thursdays, because I will still be very busy, but I'm going to try to rearrange some other house chores so that I have as few of them to do on Thursdays as possible.
I’m not feeling all that great right now because I had bad IBS last night, and I’m still feeling a bit of pain and discomfort today. I got a late start because of the IBS, and while I wondered if I should skip my “frogs” and just start on the writing, the IBS was too uncomfortable for me to concentrate on fiction anyway, so I opted to do my “frogs.”
I started feeling better later in the day and finally got started on my writing.
I started off doing the “cycling” edits on the words I finished cleaning up yesterday (which I had dictated the day before).
Yesterday, I did some more dictation and transcribed the recording, but I hadn’t had time to do the clean-up edit on that at the time, so I decided to do the clean-up editing now.
I know it’s important to train my Dragon program to improve accuracy, but I’m too lazy to do it within Dragon right when I transcribe the recording. Instead, as I’m editing the transcription in 4thewords or Scrivener, as I come across mistakes, I make a list of words to correct in Dragon so I can do it later.
After cleaning up the dictation from yesterday, I ended up with 851 usable words. The raw dictation was 1192 words. The dictation had taken 42 minutes, transcription took 49 minutes (although I was doing other things at the time rather than sitting at the computer), and editing the raw dictation took 25 minutes.
If I include the time for transcription, my words per hour was 441. If I exclude the transcription time, my words per hour was 765. That is about the same as my current average when I type and edit as I go
After I finished editing the dictation from yesterday, it was already rather late in the day and I had to start cooking dinner. However, I still have not written any new words today.
I considered just doing the bare minimum of 100 words, but I wanted to get more writing done than that. I started cooking and found I had about 30 minutes while waiting for my soup to cook.
I considered just writing using my keyboard, but then I decided to do dictation since I have been trying to get better at it this week. I took my digital recorder and went into the backyard and did about half an hour of dictation. Strangely, my backyard was more noisy than if I had gone out on the street, because even though the street has cars passing, my backyard is noisy with the sounds of the neighbors' dogs.
The dictation was again awkward and slow, and I didn't feel that it was flowing particularly well. But I was satisfied that I worked for a solid 30 minutes dictating my book, and since I was outside, I was not distracted. Lately, I have not been as distracted by my computer, but I have found that I can be easily distracted by things around the house. Being outside helped me to be able to focus much more intently, although I was worried a bit about the recording because of the dog barking.
This also reminds me of how when I did dictation while out on a walk, I was forced to work more intently because I was away from home and there wasn’t anything else I could do (unless I totally ditched my dictation and instead listened to music or an audiobook on my phone, but the dictation wasn’t so hard that I was ready to do that). The walking outside really makes me more efficient and productive than when I’m at my computer. I might not be distracted by Facebook or Twitter, but I’m certainly distracted by things to do around the house.
The only problem with my dictation today is that I had to do the clean-up edit after dinner, so I ended up working a bit late. I also ended up skipping the reading I usually do after dinner, which is necessary for me to refill my creative well. I can skip it a few times a week, but if I skip it too much, then I find my writing suffers or I just feel too unmotivated to want to work.
My raw dictation was 1085 words, in 27 minutes. Transcription took 12 minutes (I sat at my computer this time to time it). Clean-up editing took 22 minutes, and I ended up with a total of 955 usable words. If I include the transcription time, my words per hour rate was 943 words per hour, which is rather good. If I don’t include the transcription time, my words per hour rate was 1175 words per hour. However, I’m tempted not to discount the transcription time, even if I can do other things while it’s going on, because I can’t use my computer while Dragon is transcribing (since my computer is so old and slows to a crawl when Dragon is up and running).
So the final words per hour rate today, which includes dictation, transcription and clean-up editing, was 943 words per hour, which is a little bit better than my average when I type and edit as I go.
However, I also noticed that my words per hour speed just during the dictation is getting faster, so I might be getting better at it. I didn’t record the raw dictation speed on July 25th, when I first started dictation, but my raw dictation words per hour rates have been 1558 (on the 26th), 1703 (yesterday), and 2411 (today). Hopefully I can get better and faster at dictating, although I don’t want the dictation to be so messy that editing takes even longer.
I hope I can get back onto a better rhythm tomorrow, now that I no longer have any more raw dictation words that need clean-up. I’ll only need to do my normal cycling edit before I start my dictation tomorrow. I’m going to try to dictate on a walk in the afternoon.
So far, transcription and clean-up editing time combined is about the same as dictation time, so I have to remember that however long I do dictation tomorrow, I have to allot an equal amount of time for transcription and clean-up editing, so that I don’t have to do the clean-up editing the next day.
Writing streak: 266 days
Regency series:
Editing: Time spent: 53 minutes (this is cycling editing of the words I wrote 2 days ago, but not yesterday’s words)
Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 27 minutes (this is clean-up editing of the words I wrote yesterday as well as dictation, transcription, and clean-up editing of the words I wrote today)
Writing: Total number of words: 1806 words (this is the cleaned up, usable words from both yesterday and today)
Writing-related business:
Regency research reading: time spent: 25 minutes
Email: time spent: 14 minutes
Marketing: time spent: 32 minutes
My takeaway for today: I know it’s important to train my Dragon program to improve accuracy, but I’m too lazy to do it within Dragon right when I transcribe the recording. Instead, as I’m editing the transcription in 4thewords or Scrivener, as I come across mistakes, I make a list of words to correct in Dragon so I can do it later.
My second takeaway for today: When I am outside dictating, I am much less likely to be distracted. Also, when I go walking, I have no choice but to dictate for the full time I am gone, so I am forced to focus more intently. The walking outside really makes me more efficient and productive than when I’m at my computer.
My third takeaway for today: My raw dictation words per hour rate seems to be increasing over the 3 days I’ve been recording it. Hopefully I can get better and faster at dictating, although I don’t want the dictation to be so messy that editing takes even longer.
My fourth takeaway for today: So far, transcription and clean-up editing time combined is about the same as dictation time, so I have to remember that however long I do dictation, I have to allot an equal amount of time for transcription and clean-up editing, so that I don’t have to do the clean-up editing the next day.
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