Why Dictating a Book Makes For Editing Hell

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I’ve been working on editing the third book in the Leslie Kim Serials. I went through one pass and fixed all the obvious typos and just made marks where I needed to expand on a thought. Whenever I am writing during Nano, I find that I will skip scenes when I’m not feeling motivated to do it and so I need to add them later. In Chapter 11, I needed to add a fairly lengthy introduction to the chapter. I decided to try out dictating and to be fair, I’m not using a dedicated dictation app. I was using the Microsoft Word app on my phone and using the dictate feature.

Oooooh, boy. This chapter is a mess. If you think autocorrect is terrible when you are texting your mom, just wait until you try it out for your fiction! I have been editing using track changes and I looked at the amount of red on the page and had to laugh. I mean, look at it…

Once I’m done with these edits, I will obviously still have some rewording to do here. But it is so interesting to see these early editing changes. I mean, some of those sentences were not even close to what I said out loud! I don’t know if I like dictating enough to invest in a program for it. It was nice to be able to write while I was on the move, instead of on my computer, and that made things a little more fun. But the editing is waaaaay worse.

I mean, when I said “outburst from Verna” the dictation thought I said, “set for burners.” It’s… kind of close?

Post update: I did finish editing this book and even sent it over to my editor. This book is now “all black” and no red lines. Check it out here:

This post was proofread by Grammarly

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