By Claire Aitchison
Like many others, the trouble with my hands (neck, and shoulders) began while I was doing my doctorate. Poor ergonomics at work and at home didn’t help, and eventually, when I had no choice, I turned to the Dragon. (Dragon is a brand of voice recognition software). Being a Dragon user is a bit like belonging to a secret club, like Alcoholics Anonymous for example. Most of the time you wouldn’t know who was, and who wasn’t a user, however Dragon users can often identify each other by examining writing produced in unguarded moments. E-mail is the best place for identifying a Dragon user. For example Dragon users must be the only people on the planet who write ‘email’ as ‘e-mail’. Seeing this spelling is a dead giveaway – not only that the author is a Dragon user, but that they’re lazy to boot, since they never got around to resetting the default spelling.
Voice recognition software is fantastic and many people like me could not write (or work) without it. In fact when it works it is pure magic. You simply talk into the microphone and the words appear on the screen in front of you. Hands free. Amazing! When you’re writing a thesis or a long article it really comes into its own, because it progressively learns the vocabulary and expressions of the project and error is minimal.
The downside is that it takes time to learn. Although new programs are impressively fast, the early stages involve you training the Dragon – and it training you! Don’t bother to take up Dragon in the final stages of writing your thesis or dissertation. Dragon can also change the way you write. Someone commented on my first Dragon made article, that my style had altered. Dragon trains you to think aloud. These days my Dragon and I, now mostly understand each other, but not always.
Dragon users are sometimes mistaken for drunks because of their random and quite extraordinary writing peculiarities. Some personal examples include:
- Speaking about the evolution of theses over the period of candidature Dragon wrote ‘the air pollution of faeces’.
- Dragon wrote ‘felt some degree of our knees’ when I said ‘felt some degree of unease’
Last Friday I gave a handout with the reference to the wonderful book Becoming an academic writer: 50 exercises for paste, productive and powerful writing. People may receive half written emails from Dragon users because if you use the word ‘send’ or anything that sounds like that as you dictate your e-mail, it disappears before your rise! (that should be ‘eyes’).
Dragon users have a multitude of such stories. My favourite one comes from someone in a writing group years ago. This student had been working late into the night to complete her chapter to send to her supervisor. She was still ‘training the Dragon’. Deeply into a paragraph on Foucault, she wanted to go to the bottom of the page to check a footnote, and so she said ‘Go to the bottom’. This is a standard instruction which should take the cursor to the bottom of page. That didn’t happen and so she repeated the instruction quite a few times with increasing volume – ‘go to the bottom go to the bottom go to the bottom you bastard’. And then she gave up. When she received her chapter back from her supervisor weeks later there was a polite note in the margin. “I don’t understand what you mean here”.
DoctoralWriting 
Oh I love it, Claire! The Dragon and I, too, are friends some days. We were forced into our relationship because of a shoulder injury, but I’m glad we met, ’cause using Dragon allows me to produce so much more text than without it. I, too, get quite cross with my little friend when she doesn’t understand what I’m trying to write. There are some words that no matter how much I train her, obviously my dulcet tones are not clear enough for her – silly #$%^* thing! On the good days, when we’re one with one , it’s great. On the days she’s not cooperating, I go back to tapping the keys to let her gather her thoughts. It’d be great if Dragon could sing and type in music. That’d make my day just wiz by! For those who haven’t got a Dragon, I highly recommend it. One of the best tools I own.
Hi there, I check your blogs on a regular basis. Your writing style is witty, keep it up!
Thanks Wilda and Cathy,
Can’t say I’m always known for my humour; but you have to have a laugh now and then – doing a PhD and/ being an academic can be tedious, and a sense of humour helps enormously!
Nice to hear from you.
claire
where can i get it pls
Hi Patience,
Dragon is one (I think the biggest) brand name for voice recognition software. There are others too and I am sure you can buy them over the Internet or from a good IT store. I also believe Microsoft word has this capacity, although I have never tried it myself. Initially I bought my first Dragon from a shop, however I did seek additional IT advice about compatibility and so on. If you are at a university it might be worth chatting with your IT people.
And, dear readers, if anyone can give further advice or suggestions both Patience and I would be grateful. We’d love to hear from you.
Really useful for PhD students and all academics I think. I always get students to first dot point their ideas and then pop in references and then ‘speak’ each paragraph aloud. I have previously suggested that they record themselves using phones etcetera, but this sounds much more sophisticated.
Hi Michelle,
I’ve not thought of this way of using the software before – but this is a great idea. Speaking the writing/ speaking the thinking really takes you to a different part of the brain and can be excellent for unblocking ‘writers’ block’ and for progressing stuck or fuzzy ideas.
Sounds like a great way to adapt the use of this software! Wonderful if it can save a bit of time, and good for those of us who find the blank screen rather daunting. For international students who have better speaking skills than writing skills, it would also be an advantage.