Writing Without Touching the Keys

I just posted about testifying to the Education Committee on a bill that I hope passes. But there is another part of this story…

I do a lot of public speaking and usually just work off an outline (I love having a Keynote or PowerPoint when I present because it’s my outline). I never write out what I’m going to say in it’s entirety.

But I got an email just a couple hours before I was leaving to head to Augusta. “Please bring 20 copies of your testimony,” it said.

20 copies…? It occurred to me that maybe I should write it out…

But writing can take a TON of time…

But I had this app that had sat on my iPhone and iPad forever, and some folks said it was cool, but I don’t think I’d ever used it before.

I just didn’t know how cool it was.

So, I fired up Dragon Dictation on my iPhone and started talking my testimony. And there it showed up as text!

It wasn’t perfect… And I need to to get better at using the commands that add punctuation and line breaks…

But oohHH MY GOODNESS!!

I ended up with the most amazing first draft in just a couple minutes!!!

I do a fair amount of writing and it is clear that Dragon Dictation will be a great way for me to pound out drafts! (Although I have to admit that I did write this one using the keyboard…)

And now that I have a long commute each day, I’m anxious to see how Dragon Dictation might work in my car (a little worried about the background noise of studded snow tires – but those won’t be on much longer this season – I hope!).

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

1 thought on “Writing Without Touching the Keys”

  1. Jill Spencer

    I refer to Dragon Dictation in my book Teaming Rocks! Collaborate in Powerful Ways to Ensure Student Success. The graphic designer for the book read about it and immediately downloaded the app. Her son has learning issues around writing and was very frustrated. With Dragon Dictation he started writing his own “chapter books”. Is that cool or what! How I wish I had Dragon Dictation when I was still teaching writing with my students. It would have been such a help to students who had ideas but couldn’t get them on paper. Once they had their ideas downloaded and into a writing processing format, they would have been so much more willing to think about revision and editing. Do you know about Dragon Search–Say what you want to research and up pops a list of sites to begin your quest.

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