Talking Your Way Through an Edit
By Allene Symons, Long Beach Branch
If you are a digital adept who edits an entire book on your PC or Mac, then I say bravo (or brava) to you. But if you are among those who print then do pencil-or-pen edits, I say welcome to the hybrid revision club. For some of us, revision includes talking to the computer.
I came upon the trick (these days called a hack) in the early 1990s, when working on a nonfiction travel book. I had completed a first draft, but the next round required a major revision. Clearly, some editing sessions via computer feel like tech magic — you are in flow, in the zone — but that state of mind is less likely to occur during a second draft, one needing substantial changes.
Then as now, I print the first draft and go about hand-editing chapters (I appreciate good quality sharp pencils), then compile the chapters into a book at the end of the process. Many of the accumulating pages on the desk look like a tangle of line edits — deletes, sentences rambling up the margins, carets pointing to add a phrase here, arrows indicating move this graph there. All this can be enough to give you Editor’s Block (freezing up, rather than keying massive changes into an existing Word document).
I experienced Editor’s Block when writing that travel book, and the time pressure of a contract forced me to devise a workaround. It sounds very old-school now, but to tackle the most complex revised chapters I tried speaking into a recorder, then played back and keyed in a fresh chapter. Though it took time, my “block” vanished, so it was a time-saver in the end.
Thankfully, tech magic has moved on since then. I used the program Dragon Dictate when editing some parts of my last book, Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science (published in 2015). This enabled me to speak in, rather than key in, the most troublesome revised chapters, the ones that warranted a new Word file rather than salvaging the old one. The new file still required proofreading, catching some words the Dragon Dictate program misunderstood. Next, I did a copy and paste into my usual template.
Options for hybrid editing have advanced further since 2015. For Mac users, the Microsoft Office program now comes with Dictate, appearing as a little microphone icon on the menu bar of a Word file. I am using this for my current book project. For those who write on a PC, the Dragon Dictate program is still available as an application, and there are competing apps too.
It does take a bit of getting used to, but easy online tutorials explain how to teach these programs to respond to your unique voice. It’s a process (to borrow a phrase from Dreamworks) that enables you to, well, Train your Dragon.