How To Write A Book: Day 3

Talk It out

Today I got down to the nitty gritty of this process and actually started filling in the content between the chapter and subchapter headings for my book on cruise ship speaking.

If you’re just joining us, take a look at Day 1 and Day 2 of the process to see how everything has been organized up to this point.

Writing Without Writing

I was able to produce about 5,000 words today and didn’t write a single one of them! That’s right, I hardly touched the keyboard.

The reason: I used dictation software and spoke the content instead of writing it.

The average speaker talks at 125-200 words per minute. The average typer on the other hand composes at only 19 words per minute (according to Wikipedia). As speakers, we are natural talkers so it makes sense to create our written content this way.

If you do the math that means it’s possible to write 12,000 words in an hour using dictation software. That hasn’t been my experience though as I do like to pause and collect my thoughts from time to time.

Twice The Content For A Fraction of the Effort

Two hours of dictating this afternoon has yielded 5,000 words or about 42 words per minute. Considering that these are usable passages and not just stream of consciousness ramblings I think that’s pretty good.

I have a Mac so the software I use is called “Dictate”. For those of you who are still on Windows, you’ll want a program called “Dragon Naturally Speaking”. Both programs are incredibly accurate after only a few minutes of training the voice recognition software.

See This Technology In Action

I created this video about how to use dictation software as a time management tool a while back. Here it is so you can see this technology in action. It’s really quite amazing and makes writing a book so much easier than typing everything out by hand. Enjoy!

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