Getting My Rant On

[dreams_of_wings]

Okay, I will start by confessing that I have a cold and feel generally miserable and sorry for myself and tired today. Plus, having a cold means that my hands ache even more than usual, to go along with all the other body aches associated with the virus

Comments

[yagagriswold]

I'm ashamed to say that I don't know where you are in school. Given your description of the people you've dealt with, I'm thinking its not Harvard, where I know some folks at the Adaptive Technology Lab. If you think that getting some perspective from people at the parallel office at a different school might be helpful, I'd be happy to put you in touch with them.

I can imagine that it might be useful, in that they could say "Here is what we do here. Have you tried x? Your disabilities office is being reasonable/unreasonable/weird/stubborn."

I can also imagine that it might be just frustrating, so my apologies if I've just suggested something unhelpful.

[dreams_of_wings]

I am at Tufts, and I would love to be put in touch with the people at the adaptive technology lab at Harvard.

i just got a follow-up letter from the woman I met with this afternoon offering her sympathy for how difficult my situation must be in saying that so far everybody she has talked to has said that Dragon ought to be a perfectly reasonable and adequate solution. Dragon is clearly fine for stuff like replying to LiveJournal comments but I just find it really really hard to draft withand I wish somebody was willing to meet me there, in the am trying hard and not making the kind of progress that I need to, iinstead of telling me that I just need to try harder at something that's already not working.

[igrrrl]

Dragon is clearly fine for stuff like replying to LiveJournal comments but I just find it really really hard to draft with...

This is really interesting. (Here you are hurting, and here comes the neuroscientist saying, "Hmm, I wonder why..." Will you please understand this is in part my awkward I-don't-know-how-to-hug-but-I-care, brain-engaged approach?) I've spent some time thinking about how I think and express complex concepts, and the relative speed with which I do so depending on the circumstances.

I've always been a person who didn't know what I thought until I verbalized it, and how I verbalized it made a difference, too. I've been using MacSpeech for several months, and before I got used to it, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to say what I needed to say in the way I needed to say it for the technical critiques that are the staple of my working life. To my mind, the way I write on a keyboard and the way I talk almost come from different places in my brain. Empirical evidence backs this up. (In person I would hug you. In text

[dreams_of_wings]

I'm a bit stumped about why it is that I find dragons so hard to draft withh. Partly, it seems that I get really distracted by the mechanics of using Dragon, speaking punctuation, etc. Partly it is that the accuracy issuesare still, well, issues, and that if I want to be able to make sense of my writing if I come back to in a day or two I can't just let some of the mistakes slide. And it is absolutely true that for methe level of thinking that I do to dissertation is intimately tied with the physical act of writing.

I am working with a woman at schoolwho is going to help me try and come up with strategies to find dragons last obnoxious to deal with.I don't know what the results of that will be but she seems kind and creative, so I have some hope.

[igrrrl]

Thanks for being kind in response to my brain vortex about this issue. It really is something I've pondered, given that I am similarly faced with hand problems and a need to write. Although we have slightly different valencies. "Finish grad school and not waste those years" vs. "Pay the mortgage." The time pressure for me to solve the problem (or adapt) is different. Also, post-surgeries, my shear pain issues aren't as bad as yours. I sometimes can't find things by touch any more, but I can type this comment without hurting too much. When the pain was very bad, even editing the transcripts was almost too much.

I want to be able to make sense of my writing if I come back to in a day or two I can't just let some of the mistakes slide.

Oh, yes. It does a great job with words like chemopreventitive, and then turns around and gives me "leg humans" for legumes. If I don't fix it right away, it's like reading Finnegan's Wake. "What were those phonemes meant to mean?"

[yagagriswold]

I have sent email to the woman I know at Harvard and will let you know when I hear back.