I am linking my ‘Task 3: Voice to Text’ to Delian’s. We both used speechnotes to capture our speech and told personal, origin stories of a sort. With their background in Applied Linguistics Delian brings an interesting perspective to the analysis part of this task. I appreciated how Delian began by taking a ‘look under the hood’ and exploring how the technology worked. Delian points out that 80% of what they spoke was captured correctly. It made me think of how I sometimes take such wondrous technology for granted; often focussing on what it got wrong and how it frustrated me. In my own post I do not think I gave the technology the kudos it deserves.

Delian has populated their post with references to that particular week’s readings. It was clear to me how some of the references illuminated or reinforced Delian’s points, but also some that I was less sure about why they were chosen. It’s clear, however, that there is an effort to apply what Delian has encountered in the weekly readings to the task at hand. In my own post there was only one reference and even that was only tangentially related to the week’s topic. I am often unsure about including references and quotes. I wonder if I am shoehorning in a quote for the sake of appearance or am I meaningfully connecting my thoughts with the authors’. I worry with my own writing if I do not use the quote properly it can be jarring and distract from the message. However, I do recognize and accept that all communication is in part performance. We are signalling our understanding of certain conventions and expectations, as well as respecting and acknowledging our debt to others.

While I mostly agree with Delian’s point that there are significant differences between oral and written communication, I do think that we have developed ways to communicate tone, rhythm and much else that might be primarily associated with oral communication in written text. Communication is more than the message and medium in which it is delivered. It is also the context. Telling our individual origin stories to friends, as Delian and I both imagined doing, would be different from telling these stories in a different context, for example in a court of law. In both instances we might orally recount our stories, but the care we take and emphasis we make could be quite different.