Speak and Spell: How Dictation Software Makes Us Rethink Writing

Wired:

IF I’VE WRITTEN you an email on my phone lately, you might have noticed something slightly off about it. It doesn’t read like email from me used to. I use fewer contractions, fewer adverbs, and I’m more likely to ramble.

What’s changed is that, a year ago, I discovered that Android and Apple phones have become so good at transcription, it’s now much faster for me to talk than type. (And that’s saying a lot: I was a fast phone-typist.) So while sending texts and emails or using chat apps on my phone, I started talking it out—then quickly cleaning up any wrong words. There are shockingly few. I’d estimate that fully two-thirds of all messages I compose on my phone are now spoken.

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That’s convenient and futuristic-sounding. But it’s also going to change the way we write. For one, it may make our prose more casual. One small study of correspondence between two academics in 2003 found that when one of them shifted to voice-dictation software, his sentences became a bit shorter, he used status markers like “sir” and “boss” less often, and he was more likely to use first-person pronouns. “People are more personal when they’re speaking,” says James Pennebaker, a social psychologist who coauthored the research.

Read the whole story: Wired