Introduction:
This week we were asked to examine the differences between oral and written language patterns using a voice-to-text tool. The voice to text tool that I used was called Speechnotes. Last week I was preparing to run my first marathon and had a hard time thinking about anything besides running, therefore the story I told was based on my first experiences with racing. This story was unscripted and below you will find the unedited version of my oral story that Speechnotes converted into text:
Unscripted & Unedited Story: 
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Emily. Emily was really active kid; she loves swimming on her swim team she played a lot of soccer and starting to play basketball. Her parents were also very active her mom really good runner and her dad participated entrance hard for a number of triathlons every summer. So when little Emily got to Junior High she decided that she would also start running because that’s what our parents like to do. Her first cross country meet and greet 7 was super exciting remind. On the course that’s travel through the woods and she loved it and it turned out to be good at it. That first race Emily came second. So she started training really hard and she did get better and better and it was amazing. Near the end of the season at the provincial paper ranked the students going to provincials and listed the favourites and wasn’t Emily excited to see her name in the paper predicted to be one of the top in the province! So Emily’s team travelled to put Capital sweet palette for race through Point Pleasant Park it was a rainy old miserable Day by Pleasant Park emily was nervous. Because For the First Time and we was feeling she was feeling a lot of pressure. The gun went off and Emily took off with the fast l and now it’s going pretty well. Until we got to a muddy section that was down. And we thought in her head this is a good place to make up some ground I love running downhill. So I so I took off running nothing goes well for me all of a sudden I was on my knees sliding down the hill. I’m shocked. I looked down and here’s some mud I could see some blood but I was determined place that gay. So I got back up didn’t bother wiping off my knees and kept running. This point there was a number of students ahead of me emily’s didn’t feel great but I kept going. Across the line incest and I was devastated. I worked really hard for that race and I was taken down buy muddy Hill and I couldn’t understand it didn’t seem fair. However watch my teammates cross the line they all had awesome races. In Cross Country it is actually a team event where are your giving points based on your top 5 finishers and because my teammates had a great run and I worked hard to finish bit we actually ended up in third place as a team! Learn that day that sometimes your races don’t go the way that you hoped but if you get up, keep working hard finish the race sometimes you still get to celebrate a different kind of achievement. That I think Arthur Play Celebration was way more fun then I could have had celebrating a Personal Achievement in that race. Fast forward 28 years and not Emily is now lining up next weekend trying to first marathon with eight of her friends and I know does that celebration feeling really special because her friends are there.
Analysis of Voice to Text Technology:
Speechnotes was an easy to use app for recording. It only required that I tap the mic to start and stop recording and it easily allowed me to copy the text when I finished my story. Speechnotes provides a few quick tips to get started; the tip related to punctuation gives three options: dictate the punctuation, type the punctuation or press the correct punctuation button. In an attempt to keep my story as true to an oral culture as a literate person can do, I opted to dictate the punctuation. I recognize that a true oral culture would naturally pause the story and use voice intonations as opposed to dictating punctuation.
Analyzing the written conventions in my story, I believe it is fair to say that they are atrocious. Dictating the punctuation breaks the fluidity of a story, therefore I frequently forgot to punctuate resulting in a number of long run-on sentences. My story is absent of quotation marks and exclamation points, both which would have allowed for a better story. Finally, the story is one big block of text as opposed to a neatly organized paragraph format that you would expect from an educated literate Master’s student.
There are various mistakes throughout the story where the Speechnotes program did not understand my voice and replaced a word with one that doesn’t make sense. Here is a chart with some of the replacement mistakes in the writing:
| Word Written by Speechnotes | Word Said by Me |
| entrance | and trained hard |
| our | her |
| greet | grade |
| remind | run |
| Sweet palate | city |
| gay | day |
| incest | fifth |
| buy | by |
| bit | but |
| Arthur Play | The team |
Aside from the misplaced words and terrible punctuation, the most common mistake in my story was the use of the word “so”. In the short story about my running I used the word “so” 6 times. Another really obvious mistake that I made was that I switched from third person story-telling to first person story-telling. Both of these mistakes would not be acceptable in formal writing.
Despite a number of mistakes throughout the written text, I believe that Speechnotes did a decent job of converting my story to text. A literate culture would most likely be able to read this story and identify the main character, the plot and the lesson learned.
Oral storytelling differs greatly from written storytelling. Oral storytelling lacks linear development, whereas written storytelling is organized and orderly (Aboud, 2014). Scripting my story would have allowed for a more organized and easy to follow story. Due to the lack of linear development, oral storytelling can take a long time and many tangents, whereas written storytelling is deliberate and precise (Gnanadesikan, 2009). Therefore, if my story had been scripted it would have been much shorter and more precise. Oral storytelling is often less formal, uses slang or sayings and allows for the listener to hear the intonations and feel the emotions. Often these intonations and emotions are less apparent in the written narrative (Gnanadesikan, 2009). Finally, a large difference between the two types of storytelling is the story’s ability to be reproduced. Each time an oral story is told there will be changes, additions and deletions, the same can not be said for a written story.
In conclusion, Speechnotes is a good application to use if you are literate and want to quickly record an idea or have physical difficulty writing. However it is important that the user is aware of the many mistakes such as terrible punctuation and incorrect words that will require editing after the text has been dictated. It is also important for the user to note that scripting a story will most likely result in a more organized, linear and precise version of the story.
References
Aboud, A. (2014, Sept 8). Walter Ong – Oral cultures & early writing. [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvF30zFImuo
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781444304671