Dealing with an unexpected ‘break’ in my writing
I’ve often wondered what would happen if I ever became incapacitated and couldn’t do my writing. What if I broke a finger or an arm or my wrist? How would I do my work? I mean that would be like a ballerina breaking her ankle, or a pianist breaking his fingers.
Well, my curiosity has been satisfied. About two weeks ago I slipped on some ice and broke my right wrist. And yes, of course, I am right handed. I admit that at first I did have a mini-panic-melt-down over what I would do about work. I was in the middle of some assignments and had deadlines looming. Then I thought about future work. Should I turn it down? In the first few days after the accident I did, in fact, turn down a couple of writing assignments, and fortunately, everyone was very understanding. Next, I started looking into my medical insurance, unemployment and business insurance to see if I had anything in my policies that would cover me in the event I couldn’t work and earn a living. Unfortunately, the answer was no, no and no.
So, I decided to invest in some speech recognition software, and settled on Dragon, which came highly recommended by several people who had posted on my Facebook page. The demos looked amazingly simple and I thought that having a voice to text program would be a great convenience, even after I got out of my cast. Just think, I wouldn’t be anchored in my chair any longer. I could get up off my writer’s butt, stand up, walk around, march in place, do side bends or squats at the same time I dictated my copy. Perhaps my writing would be more free and spontaneous if I spoke what I was thinking, instead of waiting for my fingers to translate — and edit — the words.
Dragon does much more than just type. It opens folders, goes to your email, opens web browsers and pulls up pages based on whatever you tell it to do. I haven’t yet gotten to these more advanced commands, as I am still trying to figure out how to make it go back to a word at the beginning of a sentence and fix a misspelling. But it has already come in pretty handy. I did a Q and A interview via email, and when my subject sent back her answers, I simply had to read them out loud and the program typed them onto the page. It saved me from having to use my casted arm to physically write down the answers as I conducted the interview. Yes, I could have taped the interview, but then I would’ve had to transcribe it somehow with my bum arm. Dragon did it all for me.
Speech recognition programs are a great tool for writers and I am glad I made the investment. It is a whole new learning curve, however, and I still need to figure out how all of the features work. But at least I am able to get my words down on paper and meet my deadlines.
By the way, this entire post was created using Dragon.
If you’ve had any experience with voice recognition software I’d love to hear about it.
As always, thanks for visiting Murphy Writes.
