For this assignment I recorded my computer transcribing my anecdote of an event while alpine skiing in tricky snow conditions. You can watch the video and view the final transcription (with all of its errors intact) below.

Well there we go perfect OK so last weekend I was skiing and the snow wasn’t great some peaks hadn’t had new snow in over a week but there’s no such thing as a bad day skiing as my friends like to say so I was on a run and it was groomed which is pretty rare this particular run as rarely groomed so I was enjoying that and then I thought I would step off the side of the run to see what the snow would be like on the bumps to the side of the run and so I went off the side of the run and I’m not good enough at skiing to negotiate moguls particularly well the snow was firm and I had a difficult time of it and I made a couple turns and had to pause to regain my composure and then went for a couple more turns and really committed I dove in colour car do round and the tip of my ski on one ski broke through the wind crest and I immediately ejected from the binding and sailed sailed through the air and I rolled tubes or the energy the impact but as I landed on my side and rolled I had this thought of oh there goes my ACL and PCL there goes all of my cells when I go to twist around and thankfully my binding released immediately and I popped right out and rolled a couple times and came to a stop and there I looked up the hill and there was my one ski laying across the slope and my other ski was just sticking out of the snow I wasn’t hurt and I went to pick up my skis and put them back on and as I stood up to get back into my bindings I broke through the Windcrest again and sunk up to my knees so it was you know it was a funny experience. 

• How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?
  • First, It reads as a single run-on sentence, with lots of “um”s and “and”s, but reflecting on that I think that there is a lot of invisible punctuation implicit in our speech. My speech-to-text software did a reasonably good job, I might have sloppy enunciation or my dialect might not be recognized, but they key feature missing, to me, is the lack of punctuation. Unless I interrupt my own train of thought to tell the software “full stop” it will continue transcribing as I speak, making no attempt at punctuation other than spaces between words (which, interestingly, were not a common feature of carved lettering in Ancient Rome…)
  • Second, it shows a lack of preparedness, organization, or polish. There are several details to the story that are presented out of order, or I realized as I was telling the story that I hadn’t explained myself fully and needed to interrupt the narrative to provide a clarifying detail.
  • It also doesn’t read as a piece of academic writing. I tried to be “loose” with this piece and tell the story as I would to a friend, and so my vocabulary and grammar were chosen and ordered unconsciously.
• What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?
  • a repeated error that occurred twice was “wind crust” being transcribed as “Windcrest” or “wind crest”. The construction of a proper noun is a bit bizarre. I assume that my speech to text software, which doesn’t work when offline, uses machine learning or an algorithm to determine content or context which may help with interpretation and word choice, so this one stood out as odd.
• What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?
  • Well, it definitely would have been better organized and edited. I forgot to set the scene and explain before the anecdote that the snow was a hard crust with softer snow underneath. This made the effect of the punchline or climax less impactful.
  • I also would have been more likely to instruct the software to include punctuation without interrupting my thought, as the structure would already have been determined and the content available to see.
• In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?
  • Oral storytelling is unique in that it is blemished and flawed, not polished or refined like edited writing, but it is engaging; it captures readers in the moment and enables them to picture the events as if they are happening.
  • I personally enjoy listening to podcasts and audiobooks over reading in many cases for this reason: that there is so much more information encoded in syllabic emphasis, tone, cadence, volume, etc. than text alone can convey. This, in part, explains the rise of the emoticon or emoji – because sarcasm is so hard to communicate in text/writing alone without being misconstrued.