A Surprising Way to Improve Your Speaking and Writing.
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I would recommend anybody who is looking to make their communication more effective to try writing by voice to text. Doing this lately has made both my writing and my speaking clearer and more accessible.
Steven Pinker in A Sense of Style talks about how the classical writing style is a cure for waffly academic writing, which is often incomprehensible jargon.
The classical writing style is that which assumes that the reader knows little to nothing about the subject, and the writer is the guide that takes the reader through the topic in a manner in which they will be actually interested in it.
Expert writers in this style in the modern scene include Richard Dawkins and Bill Bryson. Rather than laying out the thoughts and stories systematically and scientific manner, they present information in a way in which you may actually want to read.
The classical style is actually extremely difficult to develop because it goes against everything we are taught. Most of our writing experience comes from school in which we are expected to lay out our points in very dry manner. They tell us we have to write an introduction and a conclusion and cover five points using evidence from the text and … ZZZ. Nobody in the real world actually want to read this kind of thing, and in reality teachers don't want to either.
The reducto ad absurdum of this approach is reached in modern academic writing, as if the writer is more concerned with impressing the readers with academic fluff rather than making the ideas clear.
Anybody who is interested in communication would do well to learn the classical style instead. It is by far the most popular and persuasive.
I have accidentally discovered a nice trick for learning the classical style. I have recently been hanging around a person who uses voice to text text messages all the time. At first I was sceptical that they would be accurate and convenient to do. I was completely wrong. It's surprising how well and accurate the phone manages to understand what you're saying. This is far cry from a few years ago when the outcome would be inaccurate, if not completely wrong.
Now the computer learns to understand your voice and cadence, and you can train it to learn your accent as well. On the iPhone, if it's not sure what you said, it will underline it in blue and you can click on it for other suggestions.
I've been trying to use voice to text as much as possible for the past two weeks, and it is both made my text messages easier to write, and also more personable.
In general my writing style is formal, and this often comes out in my text messages even though I don't actually talk like that in normal conversation. By using voice to text I've been able to make my text conversations much more personal. Reading it back, it's much more obvious that it is me speaking, rather than an economics professor.
This gave me a idea, so I wrote a few film reviews using voice to text on my Notes app. I was astonished at how much more readable my writing style was.
Voice to text writing ends up as something more like how a normal person would explain anything. If I was describing a movie to you, I wouldn't start with a highfalutin introduction in trying to impress you with my language, I will get to the important parts first. What do you need to know?
I compared my recent review of the film Good Morning, with one of my earlier film reviews that I typed up. I wouldn't say my early review was really bad, but I can definitely say that the second review is a lot more accessible to your normal reader.
Obviously there has been some editing, because you don't necessarily produce the most well structured sentences when you're speaking, and the microphone doesn't pick up all of the words you say. You may also want to change the structure little bit. At the very least it's a good starting point in making your articles more readable.
It's also much faster than typing, which if you're very busy can be a lifesaver. You can even do it whilst performing some other task. If you do it on the mobile versions of Word or Pages, you can upload the finished ones to the Cloud for you to edit later on.
Another unexpected benefit is that you make your speaking voice a lot more structured and understandable. Must people’s speech is rambling and off topic, meandering around all over the place. As well, we include ums and ah and fillers like "you know", "like" and "you know what I mean". None of that will come across well using voice to text. It doesn't understand those. So when you're trying to think what's next, you end up taking longish pauses.
After you’ve done this for a while, you can’t help but change your normal speaking behaviour. Pauses are way better than um's and ahs: they sound better, and also make you seem more profound.
Some tips:
Include all the punctuation in what you say. It saves time.
Make sure you're in a quiet place so that nobody interrupts you, and you have a decent microphone.
After every paragraph check over what you have said and make sure that it's got the jist of it. If you come back to it later you might not remember what you were trying to say.
In general I think good writing is very important. I agree with Jordan Peterson: learning to write well is the same thing as learning to think well. Try it out and let me know what you think.
PS: I wrote this article using voice to text, and it took me about 15 minutes.