Hi all!
I'm still on lunch break. I have 6 minutes to post this. That's okay, me and my headset I have aptly named Toothless can do this! In fact, just now when I dictated toothless, it made the name lowercase, and I was able to use my voice to go back,select that word and tell it to make it capitalized. It did that and we're moving on.
To recap, it's been one week since I purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 4 for Mac because primarily of my injuries from poor posture in my neck. I also use a Sony IC recorder to dictate my stories all over, often in my car, and have my computer transcribe them. When I first started, I managed 550 words dictated in about 20 minutes. Using my IC recorder to record two 11 minute files today I'm happy to report I'm up to 1190 words!!
I've taken copious notes about my sessions to dictate and my sessions to edit those words. I am consistently over 1000 words for 20 minutes of dictation. However, that total increases significantly when I dictate for longer periods of time I think because I become more comfortable telling the story. In 40 minutes, I have consistently dictated 2500 words plus. But what about editing?
On average it takes me half of the time it took to dictate the words to edit them into a polished state I consider draft material for my editor. My editor is my business partner and she reads over it, makes changes, and runs through autocrit. We do use a copy editor for our final drafts to look for typos.
So here's where I'm over the moon, jumping for joy, and screaming from the rooftops: two hours of dictation this week equated to over 7000 words of raw material. It took me two more hours total, to edit all of that material. And while that's an average of 1750 words per hour, that's higher than the words per hour I can type physically without even going into what I have to pay later in pain to do so. So even if you're not a victim of stress-related injuries, training your own Dragon might still be a good idea to shoot your productivity into the stratosphere.
Taking on a Dragon is not something you should do lightly. I tried twice before when I had no motivation to really make it work and failed. But, since Toothless and I have become best friends forever more, I've heard from other authors who've given it a try and found it works similarly for them. Make sure you're willing to give it a week or two to adjust to writing a new way. Keep telling yourself the words you write in the words you say all come from the same place: your brain. It takes a little bit of practice, but I think within a week you'll find yourself flying high as a kite with your own Dragon!
**My lunch period is over I have to go dictate more/edit more. I promise I won't keep giving Dragon updates. In reality, I won't need to, you'll just see my author page filled with books I talked out loud. But I thought one week of working with my Dragon was a good status report to share.
I'm still on lunch break. I have 6 minutes to post this. That's okay, me and my headset I have aptly named Toothless can do this! In fact, just now when I dictated toothless, it made the name lowercase, and I was able to use my voice to go back,select that word and tell it to make it capitalized. It did that and we're moving on.
To recap, it's been one week since I purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 4 for Mac because primarily of my injuries from poor posture in my neck. I also use a Sony IC recorder to dictate my stories all over, often in my car, and have my computer transcribe them. When I first started, I managed 550 words dictated in about 20 minutes. Using my IC recorder to record two 11 minute files today I'm happy to report I'm up to 1190 words!!
I've taken copious notes about my sessions to dictate and my sessions to edit those words. I am consistently over 1000 words for 20 minutes of dictation. However, that total increases significantly when I dictate for longer periods of time I think because I become more comfortable telling the story. In 40 minutes, I have consistently dictated 2500 words plus. But what about editing?
On average it takes me half of the time it took to dictate the words to edit them into a polished state I consider draft material for my editor. My editor is my business partner and she reads over it, makes changes, and runs through autocrit. We do use a copy editor for our final drafts to look for typos.
So here's where I'm over the moon, jumping for joy, and screaming from the rooftops: two hours of dictation this week equated to over 7000 words of raw material. It took me two more hours total, to edit all of that material. And while that's an average of 1750 words per hour, that's higher than the words per hour I can type physically without even going into what I have to pay later in pain to do so. So even if you're not a victim of stress-related injuries, training your own Dragon might still be a good idea to shoot your productivity into the stratosphere.
Taking on a Dragon is not something you should do lightly. I tried twice before when I had no motivation to really make it work and failed. But, since Toothless and I have become best friends forever more, I've heard from other authors who've given it a try and found it works similarly for them. Make sure you're willing to give it a week or two to adjust to writing a new way. Keep telling yourself the words you write in the words you say all come from the same place: your brain. It takes a little bit of practice, but I think within a week you'll find yourself flying high as a kite with your own Dragon!
**My lunch period is over I have to go dictate more/edit more. I promise I won't keep giving Dragon updates. In reality, I won't need to, you'll just see my author page filled with books I talked out loud. But I thought one week of working with my Dragon was a good status report to share.