Get Your Words Out - April check-in
I've written 33937 total words so far this year. I made a pledge at Camp NaNoWriMo to write 25,000 words of my novel in April, but HA that didn't work out. And I still...don't actually know how Camp NaNoWriMo works.
Most of April was spent wrestling with Dragon Naturally Speaking, first the technical hurdles and then the mental ones. I might write about the technical hurdles in another post, but the mental hurdles have been just as hard to deal with. I was really depressed one day about my inability to just TALK into the empty air. The problem is that my writing process relies on me re-reading what I've already written.--it's visual. And I wasn't sure I could change a life-time of visual training to become more auditory, considering how badly I'd done at all the listening tests in my long-ago piano lessons, and how I always need textual reinforcement when I learn new words....
And then the next day, I figured out what I needed. A visual crutch. I had already tried a tactile crutch--moving my fingers around as I dictated, as if I were typing--but that wasn't doing much. I'm just too visual/textual, not tactile.
So I got out a notebook and wrote on paper as I dictated aloud, and...it worked! It was incredibly helpful! Even if I was just scribbling squiggles that didn't really look like the words I was saying aloud, it helped a lot. It especially helped me deal with punctuation and indenting and other annoying things quibbly things that you have to dictate. With the paper/pen crutch, dictating is getting easier and maybe eventually maybe I won't need the crutch and I'll be able to do dictation on the go, on a voice recorder, which is the dream. I think it'll be a while though. I've got to train Dragon, and myself, a lot more.
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