What follows below is the transcription of my speech using the MacOS built-in software Dictation, accessed as a keyboard input alternative.

So there was a scientist in the 1930s maybe late 1920s who came up with a new chemical compound that the company he was employed by was looking for a way to increase the octane rating of the rating of the gasoline that they sold if they could increase the octane rating without increasing the quality of the gasoline they could increase their profits. So the scientist eventually after trying several different compounds came up with tetraethyl lead TEL to create what we now referred two hours let it gasoline. This man’s name was Thomas Midgley junior now he in the company the ethyl corporation which was primarily owned by Exxon and standard oil decide definitely tried to portray it as not particularly harmful although it’s pretty clear that Midgley himself had to spend some time in a show leading theory therapy in Florida trying to rid his body from the lead that he was accumulating because he knew it was affecting him but of course we wouldn’t tell the general public anything about that and the employees in the factories that made the tetraethyl lead also were well known to have suffered from lead poisoning so this same scientist who was responsible for the compound in let it gasoline which from the 1930s until the year 2000 was in added to gasoline somewhere in the world, and for which people alive today have 600 times the lead in their bloodstream then people who are born two generations before them the same man then went on to invent another compound for another company who was looking for a better refrigerant for commercial and residential refrigerators before the pneumonia was the primary refrigerant and there’s a problem with ammonia when it leaks because it is very toxic so he found a camp compound chlorofluorocarbons which are non-toxic and are an excellent refrigerant and then as we find out later this compound which is the trademarked is Freon we found to go on two wins released in the the atmosphere to be extremely destructive of the ozone layer that surrounds the earth or atmosphere that protects us from very nasty and damaging ultraviolet radiation the hole in the ozone there at the same time it’s also an extremely strong greenhouse gas. So Mr. Mitchell is to greatest inventions which is the time where heralded as the marvellous engineering and it’s gonna make your company lots of money and isn’t this a wonder product were eventually going to go on and kill us all good. Kind of in a Frankenstein moment only had two of them the tetraethyl lead and the Freon know eventually I don’t know maybe this was karma Midgley did contract polio later in life but being a good engineer and inventor he decided that to invent a series of ropes and pulleys to assist him to getting out of bed every morning because you know he had become crippled by the polio and at some point the house seems with all of his inventions that his system ropes and pulleys kind of went wrong one day and strangled him. So perhaps rather than this one invention killing us all in the future it only killed him so make make of that what you will. I tell the story is a Segway into another man by the name of Clare Patterson who was working on the accurate dating of the earth and rock sample some of the oldest rock samples that we have from the from the Canadian shield now in the those old rocks there’s a significant amount of naturally occurring uranium and so by looking at the percentage of uranium that exist there and knowing that it’s it’s rated decay they could which eventually decays into lead by measuring the amount of lead in relation to the amount of uranium in a sample they can get a fairly accurate date for the age of the rocks we’re looking for dates in November 4- 4 and 1/2 million years old. Billion years old. But Patterson found that his data or his sample seem to be becoming contaminated by lead so he cleaned his lab from top to bottom built a new lab actually in and cleaned it from top to bottom to be absolutely purely pristine there couldn’t be any more lead lead contaminating his sample but still found too much lead and eventually he was able to trace it that the lead was coming from the air in the lab that was coming in from outside eventually tracing that the source of this lead in the atmosphere to the lead that was being burned in gasoline and automobiles and that led to eventually after about 20 years of Patterson campaigning for it along with a mini other scientists to that the banning of leaded gasoline in North America in the states in the 1970s but it took another 40 years almost before that a gas was not being used somewhere in the world and today we have 600 times more lead in our bloodstream than people born two generations before and some believe that this can be directly attributed to a decline in the IQ of a of everybody born since the 1960s from what they should have been if it weren’t for the lead gasoline from the tetraethyl lead from Mr. Midgley.

Analysis

The text output of the spoken text is dramatically missing punctuation.  There is no indication of the pauses in the speech, the emphasis placed on particular words, and a significant number of grammatical errors.  Many of the sentences are run-on, and very few periods were inserted by the dictation software (the built-in Dictation feature for MacOS).

What is “right” in the text, for the most part, is the transcriptions of the words, the correct spellings of most words, and the text does tell the story as it was intended. What is “wrong” is the number of mis-interpretations (“then” instead of “than”, “millions” instead of “billions”).  Some of the phrases make no sense when some words are mis-interpreted, as for “Segway” in stead of “segue”.

The most common mistakes of the transcription are homophones or other words with similar pronunciation, such as “I tell the story is a” instead of “I tell the story as a”. These are mistakes as they change the intended meaning of the statements. But maybe even more, the lack of punctuation to convey pacing, pauses, and emphasis–the important, critical nuances of good storytelling–robs the story of character and interest. Reading the transcribed text is difficult and the thread of the story is often lost, although some might call it a glorious triumph of literature.  One of my worst experiences of reading “Literature” was “Death in the Afternoon” by Ernest Hemingway. In his stream-of-consciousness style, some run-on sentences would progress for four or five pages. My English teacher at the time attributed this to Hemingway’s  avant-garde style, but I attributed it to Hemingway drinking a bottle of whisky every morning before he started to write.

If my story had been scripted, perhaps the software might have detected the pauses in speech and inserted punctuation (it would be interesting to see how different software would process the same speech), and perhaps the reader would have been more deliberate in their pronunciation of words had they not been thinking of the words to come as the current words were spoken.

Written storytelling is more thoughtful and pedantic, as each word can be carefully chosen to covey precise meaning. However, much has to be added, in the way of punctuation, etc., to convey emphasis and tone. Oral storytelling, in some ways a stream-of-consciousness production, has the ability to change and adapt to how the story is being received by the audience (and oral storytelling is so much easier with an audience than without). Indeed, this story is one I have told many times to many classes, but speaking it only to a microphone was a much less comfortable process than speaking it to a class.