So this is what happened....
Talk to text is a tool that I recommend to a lot of my students and one that has had success with many of them. They find it particularly helpful in getting their ideas out, as well as helping them to create a written sample that records their ideas.
This was my first time using a talk to text feature, and I have to say, it didn't go as smoothly as I thought it would. For example, a sentence that was produced (possibly my favourite) was "Remove doctor no I want to place."; I'm not sure what I was trying to say. This sentence is an example of one of the most common mistakes that occurred: misunderstood words. Other examples of this include: "awkward" instead of "backwards", "the swine house" instead of "this one house", "either" instead of "neither". The second most obvious mistake is the lack of sentence structure and punctuation. Most of the transcript is just one run on sentence; one is roughly 15 lines. In addition to this, I feel disappointed (and a little embarrassed) at the lack of organization of thought and word choices. I consider these errors because I feel that they cause the story to be difficult to understand. The confusion the errors bring make the story hard to connect with and therefore does not engage the reader or audience. If I had had the opportunity to write this story, I would have organized it in a way that gave the story a better flow. I would have liked to have included some stronger word choices, maybe some literary devices, and definitely some punctuation.
Oral storytelling allows the speaker, and the audience, to feel the emotion that stories can bring in an accessible way through the use of tone, facial features, and body language. Sharing stories helps to build relationships among people. Seeing and hearing the person speak provides a different perspective than reading someone's story. The emotional response to stories can be done in a written format and connections can be made, however, it requires a skill set that is challenging to master.
Thank you for your post, Julia. “’Remove doctor no I want to place.’; I'm not sure what I was trying to say.” Nice. I had a similar experience. I thought I would be able to piece together what I said. However when I read my text immediately after speaking it I could not recall what the words were supposed to be in many circumstances including the phrase, “we on what the song was like.” If I were to do this exercise again I would record the audio of me speaking so I could reference it.