Creating Content: Blogs, Vlogs and "You Talk, It Types"
Last night, I spent a bit of time playing around the with voice recognition feature on Google Docs.
It was kinda fun, and I was impressed by just how good voice recognition has gotten, over the years. I had a little music going in the background, the dog would occasionally bark at something on the street and I still got about 95% accuracy. And that's using the mic on my webcam, not using a "proper" high quality mic.
Naturally, there's some "fine tuning" afterwards, but I expect that with all writing I do.
Macro close-up of a calendula flower
Creating Content in 2018...
As I have written previously, I am actually not very fond of so-called "Vlogs," so it may seem like a bit of a contradiction that I am playing with talk-to-type, rather than just typing.
Apple blossom bud
My primary motivation for checking out this feature is that I tend to get my ideas all in a rush, and I'm a pretty slow typist. It would help me get the outlines of ideas down, if I could just talk my way through them quickly, and then come back to polish them up, later.
Mind you, I still have no intention of creating vlogs... mostly because I can read much faster than I can listen (even if I run the playback at 2x), which is the result (basically!) of "being old" and having to learn speed reading in college, in order to make it through courses that required reading a dozen 500-pages textbooks a month.
The other thing is that I simply enjoy "making my posts pretty" with photos and such. I'm not skilled enough with video to do that... besides, I feel that the video format really lends itself better to dialogues than to monologues.
The Changing Nature of Content
Sometimes I find myself wondering if writing is slowly going away.
I don't just mean writing in the sense of sitting down and pecking at a keyboard, I mean writing that involves grabbing a pen and paper.
Leaves backlit by the sun
Now, it's easy to say that it's just "a sign of the times," but something will be "lost" if we stop writing by hand. Brain studies have shown that there are distinct benefits to hand writing that we just don't get from typing.
Many years ago, I was manager of a store that sold fountain pens and "fine writing instruments." One of the things we learned in the process of having that store is that writing by hand and typing use different cognitive functions. In fact, the way we have to "shape" letters on a page — especially in cursive writing —when we write by hand activates the same creative centers in the brain as would be used by an artist who's painting. Typing is a far more "repetitive mechanical" activity and actually not very creative.
The other thing about typing is that it takes away individuality.
After all, a "peck" at the "a" on a keyboard will always be the same, no matter who you are, and where you are. Handwriting, on the other hand, is a unique signature... you can recognize someone by their handwriting... it's a direct translation of brain impulses onto paper.
Anyway, even as I sat there talking to a computer and watching text scroll up on the screen... I felt a certain gratitude (and sense of accomplishment!) at knowing that I still hand write a journal, regularly.
How about YOU? Have you used voice recognition software and features to create your posts? If yes, do you use them to create your post completely, or just for a rough draft? Do you still hand write things? When was the last time you hand wrote a letter, or a journal entry? Do you think there's a different — in terms of creativity — between typing and hand writing? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!
created by @zord189
(As always, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)
Created at 180706 12:58 PDT
After many, many years of using only keyboards I can barely use a pen to handwrite something anymore. It feels incredibly awkward to fill out a form in pen nowadays, and trying to make my signature at the bottom of an official form is torture.
Has something been lost? Most definitely.
In a sense, I feel fortunate that I had an elderly aunt gift me a nice fountain pen when I graduated high school. At the time, we were in "the age of ballpoints" and I thought it terribly old fashioned to use ink... but I persevered and discovered it actually helped my penmanship.
As I writer, I I was often out wandering around... and so "note taking" became part of my daily life... and I never really dropped the habit when digital recorders became a fact of life. Of course, I don't hand write anywhere near as much as I used to... but I still hand write in a journal I keep, mostly as a reference of what/when we did something in our yard and vegetable garden. Maybe there's something nostalgic and quaint about it that appeals to me, as well...
School systems (in the US, at least) stopped teaching cursive writing some years back, but now they are starting to re-institute it as someone realized that we'll end up with an entire generation of kids who possibly can't even read a birthday card from their grandparents, or old documents that have been scanned into databases online.
It was a great loss for the education process to drop the art of cursive writing. "It's too hard" was the main excuse, instead of whatever their actual version of the truth de jour was.
I always write letters to family in cursive because it is more personal than the typewritten alternative. I used to keep my journal notes in cursive but gave that up when keeping them electronically began to mean re-typing them afterwards and that was time consuming.
My college note-taking took on a special meaning because I developed a hybrid shorthand/symbol method of longer words in chemistry and physics. Then, the shapes of the letters themselves seemed to make the words easier to visualize and, since my notes were in outline form, I could visualize the page of notes very accurately from the shapes of words. You cannot do that with a typewritten page. Cursive does indeed activate a different cognition area of the brain.
In later years, I watched my mother write a sympathy note with her impaired hands. She slowly crafted each letter as if engraving it. She was capturing her emotions into her writing and that is always in my mind as I write.
Typing is too sterile and clinical, but, alas, it is faster and I tend to do a lot of editing as I go, so it is the most convenient way of getting thoughts under control.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply @willymac!
Fact is, I just enjoy writing by hand, especially with a good fountain pen... and that's largely why I still do it. I don't really have any family members I write snail mail letters to anymore, although I know many who are still grateful when they get a postcard from somewhere I am visiting, and there's a real hand written message there.
I suppose hand writing reminds me to SLOW DOWN, as much as anything. I only use it now to take notes for writing ideas and craft outlines for articles (most of my Steemit posts started as handwritten notes), and to write in one of my personal journals.
Writing by hand IS different, and neuroscience backs it up. We use a different part of our brain (more like art, painting) to write by hand, as compared to pecking at a keyboard... which is very mechanical.
It would be interesting to test both methods of taking notes in a formal classroom setting; exact same subject material but one class taking notes on a notepad and the other in cursive, on paper. I feel that the cursive would be an overall more satisfying experience.
I agree with the "slow down and focus" effect of writing with an ink pen. There is a very subtle shift in focus almost as if I have changed from creating text to painting it with an artist's brush
Most times such a program can't never understand what I'm saying so I tend to not try new ones out. While it would sure be nice to be able to talk out loud my ideas and not spend all day typing as well. I'll just stick to writing things down. Least I have somewhat of an idea what I was trying to type and don' have those strange random word it was trying to guess that is as saying that I am lost for on ideas of what it should have been.
It is at least great to try new things from time to time. I'm also a decent speed type so I think its just faster anyways to type it out.
I'm inclined to stick to "mostly typing," and this was really more of an experiment to see whether I could make sense of a "stream of consciousness dump" for later use. And from that perspective it worked pretty well.
I have to give the voice to text a try because I would love to be able to take notes in the car.
There are a couple of pretty decent apps out there; not sure what kind of mobile you have, but there's also a Chrome extension that allows you to create emails with voice.
So far, I have only done this with my regular desktop machine.
I tried one random one a few months ago very briefly (2 minutes max) and it wasn't great. will experiment more.
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