Readers’ Responses to Writing Medicine
If you want to comment publicly on any of the Writing Medicine postings please write your thoughts and questions below. If you want to contact only me, please send email to
joan AT joanbolker DOT net
I look forward to hearing from you.
Joan Bolker
I like the idea of writing from a lecture. This has been a technique that I’ve used for a few years. It is easier for me to organize thoughts for a lecture than for writing. For several years, I had an administrative assistant who could transcribe my lectures to text for me…this saved a bunch of time. Now that she has moved to another position, I’ve tried software, but it is not the same as dictating to a recorder.
Your lecture-to-paper process sounds very reasonable. It’s both a “twofer” [two for the price of one], and a good way for you to use your best skills. When you say you’ve tried software do you mean voice-recognition software? Some people do well with that, after the annoying stage of teaching the software to know their voices. I have a friend who composes all of his papers by talking into a recording machine, and then having the recording turned into text by a secretary–all of his many papers are written this way (and it doesn’t require someone with the sort of skills your admin asst. had). You can then clean up the draft–and maybe see if there are any other things you want to add.
Do you mean “it’s not the same…” to say that there has to be a live person listening?
Your posting suggested to me the next one for the site–it will be called something like “Writing vs./and Writing Up.” Thanks for pushing me to think in that direction!
JB
Thank you for your excellent advice, reading it was a pleasure!
Best regards
Anna (and thanks to you, this comment isn´t the only thing I´ve written today!)
Anna,
It’s always lovely to hear that the advice is useful. Thanks so much for letting me know.
Joan
Hi, I find the advice here very useful. Writing your Dissertation in 15.. has been very useful to me and I have recommended it to my postgraduate students. I work in a medical faculty and a lot of the staff are used to dictating patient notes to a computer and Dragon naturally speaking is provided free by the Department. I have wondered if computer dictation could be used for focused freewriting or for cooking a 0th draft. It feels natural to write up patient records by dictating (I think lawyers have an analogous experience) yet I have not thought to use this for “real” writing. So would it be cheating to use computer dictation?
To begin with, it’s not cheating, and you’ve asked a very interesting question. If you look at the first response above to my postings you’ll see that he’s using a similar alternative. And I answered by talking about a close friend, now retired from Harvard, who’s always written by dictating. But my friend is also someone whose primary orientation is visual (he worked at a school of design).
Notes are different than papers; I don’t know if dictation encourages further thinking, or just goes for the facts. I suspect that writing your observations and thought out is probably a better venue for exploration. But you might try to experiment with dictating some ideas you have, and then writing them out as if the dictation text didn’t exist, to see if there’s a substantial difference. Or invent another experiment that will allow you to compare the results of the two modes. I’m a firm believer in each writer having to find the process that suits him, and works well.
Play with dictating toward an early draft for a while, and see where it gets you. (I must admit that I write by hand, because I’m a fast typist, and when I compose on the computer my writing’s terribly superficial–another conundrum about how to use technology, vs. pens dripping ink…)
I’ll await your results.
Joan