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

[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, I'm all elbows, knees, and regal prose. People who meet me IRL after a text-based relationship are sometimes quite surprised that I'm bouncy. IRL. Not on the internet.) I learned how to use the software for producing critiques, and in fact, don't like using it for more casual transcriptions. At first I almost imagined myself typing, and the flat-affect voice needed maximal accuracy has helped as well. Now I find it faster than typing, but, interestingly enough, not as fast as talking to the person.

What I mean is, I can sit down with a researcher and his or her 1-page Specific Aims for a hard-science research grant application, and in one hour with them I will read the document cold (while talking), and give the researcher a thorough critique of information flow, writing style, strength of argument, and "salesmanship." In person, it takes an hour, but dictating a written critique takes about 2.5 hours, depending on how bad the document is. Why is that? Because I can read the person's body language, point at things, and do all the IRL shorthand that I cannot do in writing. The writing has to be more precise, and have all the pointers laid out explicitly. I spend a lot of that 2.5 hours staring at the screen deciding what to say. If the person were there, I'd just be talking already.

So I really wonder what the mediation of the transcriptionist gives you that Dragon does not. LJ comments are more like talking with friends, chit-chat. You've used the technology for intellectually lower-power interactions. Is that part of the barrier, changing how you code your speech when you use it? Changing from conversation to pontification? (I don't mean to diminish. What is any dissertation but well-reasoned and citation-supported pontification?) Or does having a person to explain it to change how you order your thoughts? Academic writing always has an assumed audience, and we write to that invisible reader. Frankly, from most outside points of view, Dragon ought to be a perfectly reasonable and adequate solution. So what makes it really hard for you to use it in an academic project?

And, given that they're unlikely to come up with a person, the next question is how do you hack into that particular internal system and fix it?

[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?"