“Testing 123 alright this seems like it’s going to work so I am doing my spoon speech to text my name is Greg fountain and this is the first time I have ever tried anything like this IPhone yeah I’ve used or seen students use it and they tend to like it so I found this a little awkward to start with so I decided to put music on in the background which is kind of calming me down because I’m sitting talking to a computer so yeah so I put on a jazz album now it’s not that old Dave Brubeck album so it’s instrumental so that this won’t pick up any any words or anything like that um yeah so I’m going to start just by I was going to discuss what my favorite part of the weekend was or is but yeah no I have always kind of done oral things I was did acting and things like that when I was younger so there shouldn’t be as hard as it is but it just feels awkward when I was young I used to I used to listen to stand up comedy alot Bill Cosby was one of my favorite ’cause I would get my dad’s old records and listen to them actually I taped them all so I could listen to them in my room late at night I know even talking about Bill Cosby nowadays seems a bit taboo with everything that’s gone down with him but those always be give me to me it allowed gave me some confidence in using my voice ’cause I would pretend I was doing standup and an with an audience and trying to make them laugh and that’s what decks come through even now when when I used to teach but now I don’t teach as much as vice principle and my weeks are filled with administrative duties and new things to do with the school that we just moved into in the West brand new high school lots of glass I’ll lots of lots of deficiencies and things like that which I am in charge of at the new school so by the time we hit Friday I am ready for a break and that’s what I was going to talk about but I’m find that Friday Friday evening is not what the Friday evening used to be back when I was quite a bit younger of you’re so happy it’s there and now you’re going out with your friends or you’re doing something on a date or something like that Friday evening is basically going to bed right after the kids go to bed ’cause you were exhausted from the weekend and all the stuff that’s piled on you during the week that you just kind of want to shrug off overnight so you go to bed early and try to sleep in at least I try to sleep in but for me asleep in his seven o’clock which isn’t too bad I’m pretty excited about that but then I find that you still have work on your brain and your body is still a bit stressed and you’re still thinking about things so I find or I’ve noticed that it’s usually like I’d say that weekend really starts to actually kick in around Oh my favorite part is by about 4:30 4:30 Saturday nights I cook I try my hardest my wife’s amazing and she cooks most of the week because I don’t get home until probably like six 6:30 so she does an amazing job during the week so I’ve taken it upon myself to try to cook Saturdays and Sundays of Saturdays my first meal that I usually try to cook and I’m trying my absolute hardest to cook as healthy as I can and this might sound cheesy but I I firm believer in’s Jamie olivers cookbooks and I used one all the time he has called 15 minute meals or something like that and I don’t cook in 15 minutes I’m not I can’t multitask like that I burn the house down but I the meals are so good the kids love them we love them so I usually kick into a meal around 4:35 o’clock start getting everything ready and then once they start doing that everything from the whole last week just kind of goes away it’s nice and put some music on my wife will come in and help the kids will be around well one of the kids my youngest one will be there ’cause he still grade 7 my daughter’s grade 9 so she’s upstairs on her phone chatting with friends or looking at Instagram or something like that she comes down a bit later we find that at that point the whole stress of the week just starts to go away while we start to gathering start cooking it’s such a good feeling and then we try really hard in our family to have family time Saturday evening so it’s usually will play it board game or will will watch a movie or we play a game on we have a Nintendo switch that has four player board game kind of deals on it where we all play together even though again my wife amazing that she’s not the greatest video game player in the world so yeah I will do that and then in the evenings after the kids go to bed we in my life and I either get to watch a show or just sit back on the couch with it drink him read our books and just kind of relax for a bit and not worry about anything and then to bed the next morning it starts to fade I usually get up early Sundays and because I usually go for a mountain bike ride almost always go for a bike ride which is an amazing stress relief tune another way of not thinking about anything to do with work but usually by the time I’m coming home from that or if I’m on my way there ’cause I usually have about somewhere between half an hour to an hour drive to get to a place where we’re going work starts to see back in what’s up for next week what do I have to do you know all those things that are coming especially with the uncertainty of what next year will look like we’re already starting to plan for that all that kind of fun stuff starts to come back in and usually and again I cook Sunday night as well but I find Sunday night dinner not is not as fun as Saturday nights because things other things start to see back in your starting to think about gotta get the kids to bed early I’ve got stuff that I mean I need to get together after dinner to bring to work tomorrow yeah it’s just not as not quite the same so my favorite part absolutely favorite part of the weekend is that probably from 4 4:35 o’clock Saturday until I wake up and get in the base well I’d say when I start to come home from my mountain bike my mountain bike ride on Sunday that it’s just such a it seems like such a small time ’cause you have two days and you kind of broken it down into a lot smaller overtime but one of those are the things that I really I love to remember about with my weekends OK I’ve gone through 2 songs on my Dave Brubeck album here so I am going to say that this is done and bid everyone font farewell”
Well now, that was quite the experiment! As I tried to say in the above voice to text, I don’t use this option on my phone or anything else so this was all new to me. Of course, the first drastic thing I noticed that deviated from written English is the complete lack of punctuation. I did open up another document and experimented after with saying the punctuation at the proper spots (comma) but as this was suppose to be an oral story, and that is definitely not something I would do if I’m telling a story to a friend (exclamation mark), so I didn’t do it. I think that what has always attracted me to oral traditions is that gentle reading of the audience and knowing where and when to put pauses in for emphasis and where things need to go like stream of conscious so that listeners can grasp more insight into the story. “Umms”, “yeahs”, “like”; these are all words people tend to use for pauses in stories, to gather where they are and where they are going, and they are not used really in written text unless it is during character conversations, either to others or with themselves.
Another deviation from written English the lack of paragraphs (like I just did!). We tend to structure our writing into concise chunks of information; each chunk contending a certain thought or situation somewhat separate from the last or next. I look at the speech to text and quickly want to break it up into paragraphs as I feel that will make it make more sense and not look so daunting to the reader.
There are quite a few things wrong with the conversion, my favourite being my new pen name: Greg Fountain (I sound like a spy), but I really like what is right. The main idea of the story is present there for the reader (my “happy-time” during the weekend), and even with the jargon mistakes, word mix ups, and the loss of inflection and quiet laughs and pauses, I feel the tone of the piece is still there.
Scripting it would have changed the story; but I actually want to discuss what is meant by “scripted”. If I had scripted it as in wrote it all down and read it word for word, I argue that this would not count as a traditional oral story; it would be a written story that is being read. I am not taking away from that either! A family tradition of ours is to listen to Allan Maitland read “The Shepherd” on CBC at Christmas time. He was a master story teller, as was Stuart McLean on The Vinyl Café, but it isn’t quite the same as sitting around a campfire telling improvised ghost stories. Scripting the story and then putting it away and going from memory would be definitely closer to the more improvised, straight from the hip, approach I took. I remember when I used to volunteer with my father in community theatre there was a gentleman who had memorized some of W.O. Mitchel’s short stories about “Jake and The Kid”. He would sit on a stool on the stage and recite them to the audience (I was the lighting guy). As I saw him perform this over three weeks, I can attest that it was different than straight reading; he would change where he paused for emphasis, he made mistakes, he forgot things and came back. But unless you had seen the performance on several occasions you would never know. If I had undertaken this approach, I think the text would have been more disciplined: I had an idea of where I was going, but also let thoughts that organically came up take root and move what I was saying in their direction. With a script the piece would have been more focused.
I think that leads us to a main difference between oral and written storytelling. Once the written story has been published, there is no changing that form. The reader may change the story in their mind (characters pictured differently, pauses contrastly interpreted, but the story, for lack of a better term, is set in stone. Sit around with a bunch of people discussing a topic (fishing, biking, trips, etc) and invariably you will have everyone start telling stories. It is at this time a neat “game” starts to happen: the “One Up” game. The next story has to be a bit bigger than the last; the fish bigger, the jump higher, the trip more bizarre. Oral stories have that ability to morph into what is needed to keep the audience listening. It is this fluidity with embellishments that captures the audience into listening to stories they may have heard before, as that 8 pound trout may all of a sudden become a 15 pound bass and that 2 feet of air I pulled off last weekend becomes 10.
And so, again, I bid you a font farewell!
Greg Fountain (Super Spy)