I’ve been playing around with Dragon software. It’s been really strange trying to dictate my books instead of typing them out. I’ve tried this several times, and in the past, it really hasn’t worked for me very well. But my friend, Ruth Ann Nordin, has been using this. I figured I would give it another try. After all, I did buy the software, and I hate having something I paid money for and not be able to use it. So, as we speak, I’m actually using the Dragon software to write this blog post. And I did write about 900 words today on my current WIP using Dragon software. One of the things I noticed was that when I dictate instead of type, it seems like my dialogue sounds more natural in the story. This kind of makes sense when you think about the difference between typing and speaking something because we speak naturally, and that’s what dialogue is. I’m going to continue using this for a while to see if this really helps.

One of the things that I do differently than Ruth is that I speak my punctuation. It’s kind of a learning curve because it can take you out of your story, but I found that if I don’t do the punctuation then when I go back to edit it, it really takes more time than if I had just typed it in the first place. I really don’t want to spend that much time editing. So I’m just practicing doing the punctuation such as speaking periods, commas, question marks, etc. and seeing how that’s working for me. I think I will be able to do okay with that, but I’m still having a little trouble with saying “open quote” and “close quote”. (I actually had to type those words because, when I said them, it actually put quote marks instead of the actual words I said. LOL)

Do you use Dragon Naturally Speaking software? If so, how do you use it? Do you like it? What do you feel like the pros and cons of this are? I would love to hear from you.

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