NEW TO ME AND CERTAINLY EASIER TO USE

I AM USING DICTATION TO WRITE THIS POST !

My typing skills are summed up as, slow, tedious, and error prone, as only a two-fingered typist is. These stunted typing skills have made posting to this Blog very slow and frustrating most of the time.  However, it is interesting to note the similarity of what is going on in the process of learning how to use the speech recognition application of Windows and my slow typing.  First, learning the dictation command skills seems a lot like hunting for the right keys while typing.  For instance, hunting for the right keys and trying to think of the proper dictation command have a similar effect on my thought process in the creative phase, i.e., make me lose my train of thought.  Losing my train of thought is easy enough for me ordinarily, but this makes it worse.  I’ll never get better at typing but I will get better at dictation, so there is hope for me.  I fully expect that dictation will have a beneficial effect on my ability to quickly create a post that I will feel good about.  Second, I am less than average at spelling, so I expect the dictation process to improve the spelling of words without resorting to a spell-checker as I often do now.

My experience with the dictation of the above paragraph can be described as frustrating, but hopeful.  The Windows dictation software I am using now apparently has to decide what I’m trying to do, i.e., do the last words spoken show that I’m dictating or am I issuing a command?  Because I am fairly disorganized in my dictation, the software often gets it wrong and I have the very devil of a time getting back on track.  I’m slowly getting better at this and I fully expect the frustration level now experienced to go down to tolerable levels.