Somewhere between the final semesters of undergrad and grad school, I fell in love with the notion that writing with ink and paper was somehow more real than all the typing I’ve been doing up until that point. It was romantic in my head, harking back to my admired writers set of tools. I wanted to limit my options in what I could achieve, I didn’t want to have the ability to go back and forth and play with my thoughts and water them down with afterthought and doubt. What I thought and as I thought: that’s what I was hoping to record on the page.

Somewhere between the graduating of undergrad and grad school I amassed nearly 90 pages of handwritten hieroglyphics–scribble, if you will–neatly packaged in a lovely moleskine. This was my attempt at being a prepared grad student. I wanted to have a nice chunk of my thesis before even getting to FAU–and from what I understand, I am ahead of the curve by far. Yay! However…………I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to transfer extraordinarily large handwritten sheets of paper to text.

Enter the Dragon. Thank the lord above and below for dictation software. With Dragon, a user builds a profile and then takes their voice through a series of tests to build a level of recognition that is ever expanding and adaptable. The more you speak to it, the more it picks up on your patterns of speech and nuances of enunciation. So far, I have been able to quadruple (this is not a real statistic) my output. Instead of having to look from my deft scratchings to the screen of my computer over and over to translate, I can just read and it picks it up fairly well, for the most part. I plan on doing a presentation in class on how Dragon works.