Day 796: Dictation, day 13 - exercises, focus on one problem

Since today is Saturday, I’m working on my Hawaii book today rather than my Regency. Some of the scenes in the Hawaii book are entirely new writing, but some are simply revised versions of the original manuscript. Since I don’t use dictation for editing, I’ll only do some dictation today for dictation practice, rather than working on the manuscript.

The chapter in the Hawaii book today only needed revision, not complete rewriting, so I was doing mostly editing today rather than writing. Only an hour and a half of editing was way more draining than when I write. But I did manage to finish the chapter a bit early. It was a short chapter, only 1500 words.

I decided to go for a walk. Since I was walking, I thought it would be a good time to do my dictation exercises. Even though I am supposed to work on my Hawaii novel on Saturdays, I decided to use my Regency main novel for my dictation exercises rather than my Hawaii novel. Most of the writing in my Hawaii novel is actually revising the original manuscript, rather than new writing, and I can't dictate my revisions very easily.

I intended to simply do a dictation exercise, but I have to confess that I got caught up in dictating my scene, and ended up writing rather than doing my dictation exercises.

On the one hand, it was great that I got some writing done, but on the other hand, the dictation exercises were supposed to help train me to write better. My dictation was not any better than yesterday, with lots of silence and mistakes that I had to repeat. If I had done the exercise instead of the writing, I might have been able to practice dictating more smoothly.

I think it’s not a good idea to use my current project for my dictation exercises. I do want to actually do the exercises, but I can see myself forgetting and just dictating my fiction again.

I think what I’ll do is try to brainstorm short fiction related to the series, and then be able to use that for the dictation exercises. I might take a few days to brainstorm ideas on my walks for those stories. Once I know what I’m going to write, I can do the dictation exercises on those short fiction pieces.

I transcribed the writing, but I decided not to do the cleanup editing since it’s already late today. However, I discovered to my surprise that my dictation speed was actually rather good today, about 2600 words per hour. Granted, this is just raw dictation, and I don’t know how many usable words I’ll have after I do the cleanup, but I was rather happy that maybe there was less silence today, I guess?


I suppose I have two big problems with my dictation: 1) speaking continuously without stopping too much, and 2) making less mistakes that I have to repeat. I also have the problem of not speaking slowly and enunciating, but I try to remember to do that all the time, and I think I'm getting better at it.

I was hoping that the sentence dictation exercises would help me to rewire my brain so that I would think in sentences, which would help mostly with number 2, but might also help with number 1. But maybe instead of trying to tackle both at the same time, I should separate them and focus only on one or the other. Focusing on only one thing might help me train myself better.

So I think I will work on reducing the silence part first, and not worrying about the mistakes. My dictation speed will hopefully improve. The number of usable words will drop, so my overall writing speed will probably be terrible, but once I can learn to speak without too much silence, then I can work on not making mistakes.

My 4thewords battle report includes the dictation words I did today, but they haven’t been cleaned up yet. Still, dictation has helped me write a lot more words each day than just typing.

Writing streak: 275 days