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> Writing well takes active thought. That's why this quote is, to me, giggle worthy

Sure, but it's not clear that forcing all of that thought to happen before the first draft actually improves the final result. Many writers feel they need to bang out a shitty first draft and that much of the magic happens in later revisions.

> Tack on the issue, in the US at least, of thick regional accents and I really, really don't see Voice Input being the amazing game changer it can be advertised as from time to time

I often experience a funny phenomenon. A lot of times when I'm out for a walk or a long drive, I'll start thinking about fiction ideas. Before too long, my wandering mind drills down to what I think is an actual internal monologue of prose. In my head, it flows smoothly and sounds compelling.

I always mean to start writing it down when I get home but never seem to find the time or discipline or whatever to do so. Maybe already being in the middle of a 200k-word nonfiction book has something to do with that...

What I've always wondered is if I am actually narrating real words or just sort of imagining that I am in that way that it's always easier to imagine a drawing than it is to draw it. The real experiment would be to get a recorder and start dictating, but I never have. If I did, would that work?

If so, than it means I might "write" works in this way that for simple practical reasons would never come about at all without the speech recognition. Even if I were to summon the discipline to manually transcribe my inner monologue, would something be lost in the translation? Or gained? Or both?

> Sure, but it's not clear that forcing all of that thought to happen before the first draft actually improves the final result.

To that point, the essay "Shitty First Drafts" by Anne Lamott, 1954 is a great essay on the importance of shitty first drafts.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

For anyone doing a double-take on the essay's title being outlandish for 1954, that's her year of birth and this essay is an excerpt from her 1994 book Bird by Bird.

I have these monologues too, and they are far better written than anything that comes from my hands. So I am pretty sure I am composing in "mentalese" augmented with just enough English to fool me into thinking I am making good prose.

Speaking out loud while thinking is a good exercise, and more difficult than just thinking. But when I do it ends up in a conversational style, as if I was giving an talk to tech colleagues.

Also when I am in Germany, I find it very easy to "think in German" even though I can't speak properly.

When I'm starting a piece, I typically bang out whatever comes to mind. I keep at that for a while, and then rearrange it, as a crude outline. Then I flesh it out. Often, first thing in the day, blocks just come out, as if someone is dictating to me. Sometimes, I wake up seeing printed text. Then I go back and rewrite, and shuffle as needed.

I've come to like Geany, because it's simple, but has spell check. I don't have much need for layout, beyond HTML.

If it is practical in your case, perhaps using a voice-recorder is a useful option.

Great point.

The only people I've seen (and Ive tracked metrics in stuff like this among large user) using dictation beyond texts and short replies are specialists like attorneys and doctors and people in a bind with injuries.

Personally, i type faster and more accurately than I talk. The 1960 version of me would probably prefer dictation!

A friend of mine is an extremely talented developer (between jobs actually) and he loves his tech gear. Specifically smart phone tech.

We had a long argument about usefulness, because as a Writer, I carry a small notebook and pen. Our joking back and forth went over stuff like "Battery Life" (Phone has a concern, notebook does not) and "Water Resistance" (neither scores that great), "Cost and Maintenance" and so on and so forth.

For my needs - writing notes - the little old school approach won, but it was inferior for his needs.

Digital becomes a real boon when you are creating knowledge networks; connecting pieces of information, or tagging them. This metadata is, as far as im aware, best suited for being stored digitally.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a knowledge management app thats core focus is connections and tagging (amongst many other useful features)

One of the better pieces of advise I got in college was to use dictation to make a rough draft. Basically explain what your topic is about as if you were telling a friend, or get a friend and explain it to them. Then go back and edit.

Huh. Interesting. I'm going to have to try that. Sometimes the writing process does get in the way, as speech allows for faster changes in thought and direction than writing or typing, I feel. Which makes it good during the brainstorming phase.

The best writing I ever did was on an Alphasmart 2000 word processor [0]. I'm way better at getting my thoughts down using a keyboard than pen and paper, but computers are just too distracting.

This little thing was perfect. A 4-line black and white LCD screen with save files and no frills. Push the power button and start writing. Use AA batteries that last forever. Practically indestructible - toss it in a backpack and go.

[0] http://lowendmac.com/1999/alphasmart-2000-a-different-kind-o...

> Formal writing style - especially in long essays - is quite different than spoken word cadences.

i think many observers say that reader preferences are trending to a more conversational style these days anyway.

and, if you have an iphone, you can use the dictate command on the keyboard to input into the notes app. you need to do a fair bit of editing, it's true, but many first drafts require that anyway.

so all in all, i think that dictating your first draft is a pretty smart idea, especially if these conversational flashes happen to you during a walk, and also if you are prone to forgetting them before you get them down.

for instance, i dictated the first draft of this comment on my walk just now, and then emailed it to myself to post it here. i cleaned it up, of course, but if you want to see the original, as is, i posted it here:

> http://zenmagiclove.com/simple/comment.txt

> i think many observers say that reader preferences are trending to a more conversational style these days anyway.

Even if that is true, actual conversation is full of digressions, half-completed thoughts, repetition, incorrectly chosen words, etc. It's remarkable how incoherent a transcript of speech can look compared to how coherent it sounds listening to it (Donald Trump is a prime example of the phenomenon, as an untrained public speaker).

nobody talked about dictating "true, actual conversation".

here's what prompted that:

> when I'm out for a walk or a long drive, I'll start thinking about fiction ideas. Before too long, my wandering mind drills down to what I think is an actual internal monologue of prose. In my head, it flows smoothly and sounds compelling. I always mean to start writing it down when I get home but never seem to find the time or discipline or whatever to do so.

"True" belongs to the phrase "even if that is true."

ah, i see that is true. :+)

While I'd concur in your skepticism about voice specifically, I still think documents are becoming increasingly multimedia, with elements such as video, interactive elements, graphs and tables etc, and I feel like traditional word processors, which are the go-to tool for many people for authoring, are woefully inadequate to handle such rich documents.

Most of the time, I feel like it would be easier to write HTML markup to style documents than it is to poke and prod at the Word formatting options. In college, when I was routinely having to write papers that needed footnotes and specific formatting styles, I nearly broke down and learned LaTex, I got so frustrated. And, with HTML, it would be trivial to add in the types of multimedia elements you mention.

If only I could convince the non-technical people and management on my team to ditch Word docs... If nothing more, it more make version-control merge conflicts so much less painful to deal with.

The funny thing is, what you're dreaming of is basically WordPerfect, the word processor that ruled the world for many years until Word came along and killed it.

WordPerfect didn't use HTML for formatting, because HTML hadn't been invented yet. But it did use its own set of formatting tags, which are more or less analogous. And it had a "Reveal Codes" key you could press at any time to show all the formatting tags that were active in the current document, letting you tweak their placement, add new ones by hand, etc. You could always get directly at the logic that was being used to format your document.

Word's big selling point was that, being Windows-based, it could abstract all that complexity away and let you format documents entirely visually. And it worked! Or at least, it worked well enough for most people most of the time. But the problem with Word's approach has always been that, when it doesn't work, it can be incredibly frustrating to figure out exactly why. Which was never a problem with WordPerfect, since there was no layer of hidden formatting magic sitting between you and your document.

And likewise WordStar, which was the previous standard word processor that WordPerfect displaced, also had visible formatting codes.

I find that to work effectively on large Word documents you really need to understand the underlying object model. Everything is an object, and the objects fit together in reasonably consistent ways. But when you don't understand the model then it seems like things happen randomly to the document format for no good reason.

It also helps to turn on the display option "Show all formatting marks". That way you can kind of see the objects and boundaries. Even though you can't directly manipulate those markers like tags in TeX or something they still give helpful clues as to what's happening.

(I'm not trying to defend the usability problems in Word, just pointing out some ways to live with them.)

Do you know any visual (dare I say wysiwyg) HTML authoring tools that adhere and emphasize semantically sensible markup and working efficiently with styles, especially in the context of using some predefined corporate templates? Something that captures the few good bits from Word and applies those to HTML based document model?

SharePoint was a great asset for my proposal team over in Finance for version control issues and Word compatibility. Not a cure-all, but it worked for the non-technical folks well enough (and saved a lot of heart burn).

If only we had a decent way to print those html pages to pdf. But It seems like the print-css is kind of neglected. The stuff barely is doing what it should(page-break and friends).

Neither can you really use min-height=20mm. A pity. And the nicer pdf creators (weasyprint) don't understand the new css rules like flexbox or grid.

So we are still stuck. No easy way to force a footer to the end of a printed page via css.

Have you tried Prince? I haven't used it myself, but heard good things about it.

Aren't margin boxes the way to go for page footers and such?

edit: This page recommends PDFreactor, which seems to support at least flexbox https://print-css.rocks/tools.html#pdfreactor

Actually I will do my best to agree with you outright on the multimedia front! I'm a huge fan of Medium (70+ pieces on there) because of the freedom to intermingle material with the text. It's quite powerful.

However, I use those elements as supplements to the written word, not vice-versa (ex: blog spam / slide shows with large image, little text, big ads)

> Pretty fun article. I did a major Research Paper on slowing down the English "writing process" on purpose to focus more on fundamentals (grammar, spelling) without the assists of modern technology. Start with quill, eventually get to typewriter.

But it's only recently (two century or three) that grammar and spelling are the fundamentals.

Some portions of the bible were written by a scribe who took dictation. Sometimes they took the pen to write something important in their own hand, (normally a closing), but most of it was not written this way.

Today we consider their writing formal. Was it that way then though? (I've never actually cared enough about the topic to see if history says anything more)

Forget the Bible -- "take a letter please" was an almost stereotypical expression associated with executive types and their secretaries. Dictation to a human secretary was a more common form of "input" for the executive class than writing the letter oneself; personal computing was met with some resistance by corporate execs in the 70s and early 80s because you had to type at a PC to operate it, and typing was viewed as a skill used by secretaries, clerks, and other such minions.

The way that the Bible reads today, in English, after countless revisions and reformulations, translations and copyings, is so far removed from the original Greek or Aramaic that it's almost inconceivable that the words on the page are even close to what was written two thousand years ago.

The formality of the Bible in English can be in large part attributed to the King James version, and other versions of that time period, where you've got the turmoil of the reformation, with the English King as the head of the Anglican church in opposition to Rome, as well as a relatively tumultuous internal political climate, and so a lot of passages were tweaked around to reinforce royal authority.

Per Wikipedia the different New Testament texts have a 99.5% accuracy with each other, and the oldest existing manuscripts were written ~200 years after the original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism_of_the_New_T....

Modern translations are done based on analysis of the existing Greek manuscripts, not based on the KJV so any political meddling with the KJV doesn't affect the NIV, ESV or similar.

True but unhelpful, since Aramaic had riches and critical distinctions that have been dropped entirely or conflated on the way through low ancient Greek and into older English. For example, four or five different words with quite different meanings have all been rendered as "forgive" or "forgiveness" in the KJV translation making a contradictory and uninformative mess. (Philosophically speaking - it's still great if not entirely comprehensible poetry.) Given how central the Bible was to that concept, the KJV also impoverished our language, setting up an impossible problem for translators and helping to make us all much more ethically moronic than we'd otherwise be.

The manuscript evidence very strongly disagrees with you.

And how many revisions of editing (and translation) has the text gone through from the point of dictation to the current day when we consider it to have formal style? I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that even the scribe would perform significant amount of editing on the fly to construct reasonable structure.

I would also imagine that dictated language and spoken language are somewhat distinct categories, I would rather consider dictation to be an input method for writing rather than a form of spoken language, if that makes any sense. Sadly I don't have any background to actually claim this as a fact, maybe some linguist could chime in?

US regional accents are pretty mild compared to what you would see in some other languages (and even to some extent to what you'd see in English in some other places).

I have a friend who is a professional translator and apperantly speech to text is heavily used in that field (and thus translators often benefit from having quite beefy PCs).

That seems odd, since translators are usually concerned with written, rather than spoken material (the latter generally being the province of interpreters).

Why? She reads the written source material and dictates it to the computer in the target language.

Oh. I imagined the source was a recording.

You can't make giant evil genius evidence walls with vocal samples. We will always have use cases that prefer the written word.