1. Speak an unscripted, 5 minute long story into a voice-to-text app. Unscripted means that your story should not already exist in a written format. Think of this as simply talking to a friend and telling them an anecdote. Except, in this case, your “friend” is the microphone of your device.

In order to “write” this text, I used Google Voice-to-Text which was built into my Android phone. I put a timer on for five minutes and began to speak until the timer was up. Luckily, this timer matched up nicely with the ending of my impromptu rambling, which focused on some unfiltered thoughts about a novel series from my childhood that I reconnected with yesterday. The program’s interpretation of my story is transcribed below. 

I’ve been thinking for a while about what I would like to talk about for this story but since I couldn’t think of anything in particular I decided to just talk about the books I read yesterday. My when I was a child I read this book series called another birth that I really really loved but unfortunately I was never actually able to find the fourth volume of the series and bookstories. Since my parents were never fans of actually ordering books online for me I just have to live the rest of my life never knowing what happened in that final volume. That made me really extremely upset because I really love that series. Thankfully now a week ago I thought of the series and realize that I had the first three volumes of my shelf and thus I decided that it was time that I finally got my closure and then you what happened in the fourth book. So I order the book online and on Thursday it arrived at my house. Yesterday evening I decided to sit down and binge through the entire series and it was such a lovely experience. The books are definitely meant for children. They are not the most engaging to me now as an adult reader. However I think that there are a lot of things that are still so wonderfully captivating about the series and I really appreciate being able to get the closure that I really wanted as a child. One thing that truly struck me was the care was this one character. Her name is Mistral and she is a lovely creature a lovely person but what really struck me about her character is just what she represents. In media you don’t often see pregnant women being used as a main character unless if the woman is going to be representing some form of grief I find especially when it comes to things such as sci-fi pregnant women are so often associated with this fear and loss of the baby as a source of drama and as a source of tragedy. But Mistral on the other hand is a character who deals with their pregnancy in a really interesting way she is very honest about the fact that she is pregnant and that she is scared to take the same risks as her peers. Although she initially thinks that what they’re doing is nothing but a game to when she actually realizes the stakes of the situation she bows out. However eventually she ends up joining everyone else and fighting on the battlefield and she ends up being one of the main Warriors who takes a stand and there’s something so refreshing about seeing a pregnant woman depicted as a source of strength and as a role model and a mentor in a story while still being given this trust and the opportunity to act as a warrior in a way. I don’t know I just really appreciate how much agency they give her in the story and yet at the same time they are very practical in stating that she needs to take care of herself and if something happens she needs to escape for very reasonable you know causes in order to protect her child. It’s just not something that I feel like I seen very often in sci-fi media so it’s been on my mind for the last 24 hours as I’ve been sitting on these four books that I tore through yeah I think I like her a lot more than I did when I was a child.

2. Using the written task as it is (DO NOT EDIT YOUR TEXT!), identify and analyze what you got, using the following questions as a guide:

• How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?
• What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?
• What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?
• What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?
• In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling? 

This text deviates from the usual conventions of written English in numerous ways, all of which may be seen as ‘mistakes’ if it were to be scrutinized as a formal piece of writing created through writing rather than as an impromptu oral text. First off, there is no punctuation other than periods, leading to a written excerpt which feels flatter and more meandering than it would have been had it had other written indicators for tone, movement, and expression. This is caused by the fact that in order for punctuation to appear, one must actually state the desired punctuation into the microphone. With periods at the end of each sentence, I found it to be a simple task to simply state “period” once my thought was complete. However, the natural breaks in my diction, my rising and falling intonation, and my smaller utterances and pauses, were not predictable. Therefore, I did not know when I needed to add in other punctuation points such as commas, exclamation marks, and semicolons to aid the future readers of the written copy.  

There are numerous grammar mistakes from when the program was unable to pick up the word which I had spoken. This left certain parts of the story feeling disjointed; occasionally, the program picked up the entirely wrong word, which only adds to that confusion. As this was unscripted, there were definitely interjections and rambling phrases (such as “I don’t know”) randomly appearing as I spoke into the microphone. Some of my habits in speech, such as the repetition of adjectives and adverbs for emphasis, are not normally considered ideal in written text, and thus I would normally edit my writing to be more varied and engaging unlike the form presented here.  No formatting, such as paragraphs, is present to ease the reader through the written text. All of these errors gives this excerpt the feel of an aimless, unedited, and perhaps ‘unprofessional’ text when compared to traditional writing conventions. 

Scripting this story would have made all the difference in regards to its ability to adhere to the conventions of written English. I find that I am far more eloquent in written text than I am in spoken language due to a variety of reasons. For one, I am an avid reader and writer, and oftentimes can read and write at a speed which my spoken words could never match; two, as I grew up with a speech impediment when I was younger, my written language developed into sophistication far earlier than my oral language, for which I had to focus on mastering pronunciation with a severe stutter rather than mastering complexity of spontaneous oral language. Had I scripted this story, it would have been much more organized in terms of the structure of the content. The language utilised would be more diverse and thoughtful. There would be a greater emphasis on tonal indicators through punctuation, and repetition and interjections would be eliminated unless used stylistically. Overall, the story would have been written, formatted, and edited to ensure that a reader would be able to implement my own narrative inflections, emotions, and reflections into their internal read of the story as closely as possible. 

In this way, oral and written storytelling are extremely different. The pitch, speed, volume, and tone of one’s voice carries a large portion of the weight in regards to oral storytelling; rather than just the words themselves, it is this mode of delivery which truly creates an impact on the audience. Even if the language is not “perfect” as defined by prescriptive grammar rules, these additional sonic elements in the performance of an oral text allow for the audience to immerse themselves into the narrative. As explored in the readings for this week, language originated in oral tradition, and spoken word is the natural, authentic way of communication which has existed for as long as the human species. Writing, however, is far newer. In writing, one needs to find other ways to replicate these inflections in order to convey the message of the author correctly. Punctuation creates rhythm, emphasis, and flow; paragraphs create organization and structure; spelling and grammar create a schematic for language which anyone fluent in the language can follow; and stylized formatting can highlight portions of text to draw attention. By utilising these conventions in written text, written storytelling is able to recreate that oral speech internally to convey the emotion, information, and intention of a message.

References

Gnanadesikan, A.E. (2011). The first IT revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet (pp. 1-12). John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304671.ch1

Schmandt-Besserat, D., & Erard, M. (2007). Origins and forms of writing. In C. Bazerman (Ed.), Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text (pp. 7-26). Routledge. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.4324/9781410616470

Haas, C. (2013). The technology question. In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy (pp. 3-23). Routledge. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.4324/9780203811238

Ong, W.J. (2002). Chapter 1: The orality of language. In Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word (pp. 5-16). Routledge. (Original work published 1982). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203426258