Day 910 - Dictation writing maybe not as well-written

My IBS is better today, and as a result, I feel like I have a lot more energy. It’s been easier for me to spend more hours working since my energy levels are higher.

I can’t always count on my IBS being better and my energy levels being correspondingly higher, but I want to take advantage and get as much work done as I can while my body is cooperating.

I’m editing my book right now and it’s going smoothly. However, I have noticed something although I’m not entirely sure if it’s true or not. It seems as though my writing with dictation isn’t quite as good as when I’m typing.

A big reason is because I didn’t see patterns of word choice when I was dictating, and so there’s a lot of repetition. The problem is that I don’t always catch it when I’m editing, and sometimes I catch it later when I’m almost done editing the scene.

I don’t think my writing is bad, and there are moments of loveliness in the prose (I hope I can say that about my own writing). But I do think that my writing when I was typing was a bit better because I could clearly see what I’d written earlier and avoided a lot of the repetition. I also think my writing when typing is clearer, again because I had seen what I wrote before and could structure the flow of the narrative or dialogue more smoothly and elegantly.

This is a curious thing for me to notice. I don’t think the dictation is bad, and I’m still hopeful I might be able to do more practice on dictation later. But seeing the slight difference in the writing makes me think that if I do dictation later, it might be better to dictate where I can see my words as I dictate them, rather than dictating into an MP3 recording.

Unfortunately, that limits a lot of the freedoms of dictation. I think I dictate a lot faster when I don’t see what I’m dictating, and I can’t look at what I dictate if I go walking and dictating.

But ultimately, I care more about the quality of my writing over my speed, and if I don’t write as well while dictating into an MP3 recording, then I’m going to have to rethink that.

Also, if I can figure out a way to dictate directly into Dragon without slowing down my poor old computer, then I might be able to dictate and see what I’m writing as I go. Maybe I’ll experiment a bit with that later. It might be possible if my IBS continues to get better, since I had quit dictation before because my IBS was bad and I wanted to eliminate as much stress as possible. Typing was a lot easier when I was feeling sick from the IBS, so I just went with that and quit the dictation practice. But it wasn’t because I hated dictation or anything like that—it’s just that dictation is very hard for me, and I wanted to make the writing as easy as possible because I wasn’t feeling well.

I’ll continue editing, but I don’t think I’m wrong to think that my dictation writing isn’t quite as elegant as typing, only because I was writing without seeing what I’d written before, and so word choice and the flow of the narrative wasn’t quite as clear.

Writing streak: 389 days

My takeaway for today: I think that my dictation writing isn’t quite as elegant as typing, only because I was writing without seeing what I’d written before, and so word choice and the flow of the narrative wasn’t quite as clear.