The speaking writer

05/2020

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to improve the fact that my damaged hand/arm/whatever, really, keeps me from writing. I used to write blog posts, reflections, letters, short messages with a length to the moon and back (how many characters that would actually be, I wonder should be roughly 202.848.000.000 monospaced characters, measured at a font size of 16px on a display).

You could already guess that one might not be as good at speaking as one is at writing and vice versa. Both are entirely different skills. Ignoring that fact, I set out to try and use speech to text to overcome using my hands all that much. If you want to feel really incapable of something, go ahead and try creating a “written text” from speaking when the latter is not your strong suit either way. It was really painful to speak like that and see the result. The text that formed was not in the slightest what I would write by hand.

Some days I am all up in my mind exhaustively formulating things I would say or write, so I do not quite understand how you can not put those same thoughts into speech like you would into writing. It’s like missing a clipboard where you can rearrange your words before putting them out there, even when there is no audience that is waiting for you to speak up. I guess it takes a lot of practice and patience to speak your thoughts as you would write them. I might try again from time to time, just to see where it is going.