“So a few years ago my aunt was in Zambia where she often goes to do missions trips for her church and this one particular trip she was buying a horn from a shop in the village that she was staying in and this is called a kudu horn some sort of like an antelope that lives in Africa and she bought it and got all the proper paperwork that you need saying that it’s not filled bugs and on her trip home they asked if you have the paperwork and she said yes I do so she felt that everything was going to go well and they looked at the horn they looked at her and they said it that you are under arrest and so she was very confused and they said that these horns are National Treasures and that she would be arrested and put in Lusaka prison for stealing a National Treasure which she purchased. So they take her to some sort of detention room in the in the airport and so they’re speaking of languages she doesn’t speak and they’re very nice and very angry and so it’s very unnerving to have that kind of experience when you have no idea what’s going on and they keep she keeps asking them what’s going on and that she wants to speak to Dennis. And they all look at each other like oh no not Janice she knows Dennis and so Dennis arrives into the detention room and it turns out that Dennis is the head of the airport and he is a man that she’s known for many many years how to save the day just very fortunate for her and so he speaks the same language as the guards so luckily he was able to kind of act as a translator for her so it while he was listening in the conversations that he could also speak to the guards and they were talking to Janice and she’s going to know if you want to be not in Lusaka prison end listening to them while sitting with her and he’s kind of looking at her and saying it doesn’t look good like it’s this is not going well and then I forget what exactly happened but he convinces them. She should be more put on I guess they should let her go and under certain conditions I guess and so the guards agree that she pays them a certain amount of money that she can go but they’re going to keep the horn and so they let her go to the ATM which is kind of surprising they just let her walk across the airport all by yourself if you can do that had to change her and she goes and gets how much money does and she comes back and give them the money and then they let her board her flight she has to go like go to court for whatever this day she was and so she gets on her plane and Lance in South Africa when she is very she gets off the plane and immediately was greeted by a guard and just thought this is the end up going to jail I don’t know what I did but this is it and the guards he was just an airport security sang welcome to South Africa is she almost just broke down and crying cuz she totally thought they’re going to arrest her for no reason and she gets back to Canada and now she’s dealing with all of this court stuff and to Dennis amazing heat like he’s in Africa where the problem is happening and he goes to court on her behalf and she kind of joints and a habit this happens over a few years and it takes years and years and years for her to finally get the corn back like delivered to Canada and it turns out that the horn that caused all this problem made in the United States so it never was a National Treasure it was just a fake corn made in America and that caused all of this these problems.”

How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?

Having never used speech to text before, I was surprised how unnatural it is to say “period” to end a sentence while sharing a story in this manner. The majority of my transcript is one long run on sentence because, naturally, pauses in speaking do not translate onto the page.

What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?

We all have different dialects, accents, varying degrees of mumbling and clarity when we speak so different people saying the exact same thing will get slight variations in the text that comes out of speech to text. As previously mentioned, I neglected to add periods most of the time as it is unnatural to verbally declare that a sentence is over. While reading it back I also noticed that a whole section was completely omitted- perhaps because I was laughing a bit through this missing section that it was too unclear for the technology to pick out words. It is also very clear that the transcript sounds nothing at all how I usually wrote, leading me to conclude that our spoken and written languages are very very different. Though there were many mistakes, I was quite pleased how accurate a lot of the transcript was.

What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?

The most common mistakes in the text seem to happen when a word that I said has multiple other words that sound similar (ie. “horn” often was turned into “corn”). The other mistakes I saw most frequently were when I would self correct my speech, such as changing “this” to “that” when changing tense. When you are typing, of course you take these mistakes out so no one ever sees them, but with speech to text, everything that comes out of your mouth is suddenly on display.

What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?

If it were a scripted story I am sure that I would have spoken a lot more formally, leading to better grammar, made less word corrections and would have probably said “period” to end each sentence. This would have likely produced a text that would have sounded less casual, would have been easier to read because there would have been fewer run-on sentences and lazy or incorrect words.

In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling? 

For myself, my written and oral storytelling and communication are very different and after this exercise I can really see where the differences lie. When I tell a story orally or give a speech, I feel more comfortable not reading from a script and just adding my own personality and jokes into it to make it feel light, silly and casual. I have now learned that that does not translate well into written text as it sounds more lazy and uneducated than it does when saying or hearing it outloud. My written work on the other hand (in my opinion) is very eloquent and formal, which also does not translate well to oral language because it sounds stuffy and unnatural.