In reply to Becki.

Ah, the sweet voice of reason! It’s probably a brilliant suggestion, actually. I may just be trying too hard. Even if I end up including punctuation as I compose verbally, I don’t necessarily have to do it that way to start with. So I think you’ve changed my plan for the rest of the day. Thanks!

Thing is…I want to figure out not only a way to do this that works, but a way that’s actually better/faster than typing. Which is probably dumb of me, but it’s how my brain works.

Assuming, arguendo, that this is a reasonable goal? Editing to put in punctuation takes lots of time. Especially stuff like adding quotation marks, you know? And the software makes editing (verbally) both easy and hard. I can say stuff like “Select ‘No way’ thru ‘period.’ Quote that.” (only without voicing any of the interior punctuation in this case), and it works. But…it uses straight quotes when I use that command, and I need ’em to be curly. I’ve modified the software to use curly quotes when I say “open quote” or “close quote,” but for the all-in-one command? No dice. So that means I need to figure out automated rules for straight-quote replacement, right? Which I can totally do, and then ignore the issue until I finish a draft. Just as soon as I force myself to give up on getting it right the first time. {8’>

This stuff bugs me, is all, and I should get over it. Or I should rewrite that command within the software, which is actually possible–but I think doing so will require me to pay another couple of hundred bucks for the “pro” edition.

There are other things that don’t quite work for fiction writers. The software thinks paragraphs should be followed by two carriage returns. This matters, ’cause if I either change the “new para” command to use one carriage return or use the “new line” command instead (either approach is fairly easy) and then try a command like “select paragraph”? It then selects the entire document. This glitch alone messes up a surprising number of commands, actually. So this means I need to either rewrite a lot of commands or just do a post-processing carriage-return removal.

There are other issues–basically I think the software works a lot better for writing email than writing fiction, and definitely takes a non-pro approach to spacing before and after some punctuation (though I’ve managed to fix these issues so far). It surprises me that it’s so backward with this basic stuff, while simultaneously so good at the hard part (meaning voice recognition).

Actually the software will put in commas and periods (only) for me if I want it to. Which would be a nice feature if they were anything close to reasonably placed. Though it does yield amusing results, so if I’m writing self-referential comedy it may turn out to be a nice feature.

So…either I need to teach myself to voice the punctuation, or I need to spend lots of time editing, or I need to get the software to do a few things better, or I need another solution (short of giving up, I mean). My most likely solution is to dictate everything as plain text, and write an app that will do a lot of my formatting for me afterward (meaning it could fix straight quotes, fix double carriage returns, curlify straight apostrophes, and possibly deal with capitalization issues and end-of-paragraph punctuation I may have left out).

Theoretically I could dictate and create an RTF doc, which would then remember stuff like italics, but…that’d be harder to code my first-pass editing app to deal with. And what the heck, adding italics later is fairly easy and doesn’t come up all that often. Other than italicization, plain-text is probably all I need.

Then there are other issues that have come up–the software occasionally crashes, and if I’m doing my editing (or dictating!) in its dedicated word processor that means I lose whatever hasn’t been saved. And there’s no auto-save feature. If I’m doing my (voice) editing in another app, that means a lot of the (awfully convenient!) voice commands don’t work very well.

So…I guess these are all just workflow issues, really, and I should figure them out somehow but probably separate that from the learning-to-dictate-fiction bit. Just as you suggested.

Thank you! {8’>

Maybe consider non-sentence-ending punctuation as an editing task, rather than a writing task? I’ve not used dictation software before, so I have no idea if that would work or not. But maybe if you only enunciate the sentence-ending punctuation that would help your creative flow, and then you can go back later to add the mid-sentence punctuation when you do your first editing pass. Just a thought that may or may not be in any way helpful. 🙂