Task 3: A (Crazy) Birth Story

Here is the direct text as recorded using voice-to-text software:

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when my wife had our fourth child a few years ago it was one of the craziest experiences of Our Lives her water broke in the morning and we Call the Midwifeshe said that we should waitand just see how things progressed so we just kind of took it easy for the rest of the dayand didn’t do a whole lotwe mostly hung around homenothing really happened for the better part of the dayand so we kept going about our routines I went out with my kids to deliver the flyers for their flyer route that we usually doeventually Cheryl started to get agot feeling that something wasn’t rightso she called the Midwife again and the Midwife came over to check and see how things were goingturns out that there was of cord prolapse which means that the umbilical cord was coming out first and that is a very dangerous situation because the baby can start to come and push on the cord and cut off the blood supplyso this is a very emergency situationand the Midwife called nine-one-one immediatelyI was out with the kids stilland so my sister-in-law came and got meimmediatelywhen I got home the Midwife was there with my wife and they were waiting for the ambulance to arrivebut before the ambulance came a fire truck came and saw a bunch of firefighters came in andtrying to assess the situation but my Midwife just said we were waiting for the ambulance once the ambulance arrivedthey went down the stairsand had to jump in the ambulance in front of all of our neighbourswho were looking onthe ambulance took off and went to the hospital so I left our kids with my sister-in-law and took our vehicleand went after it we went flying down the roadand I even blew past a police officer who was waving me overto give me a ticket because I was speeding but he didn’t chase me because he must have known I was following the ambulance that had just gone byonce I got to the hospitalI had to go wait in a waiting room because they had rushed my wife in for an emergency C-sectionand it was all a very surreal feeling while I just sat there and waitedeventually they came out and told me that everything was okay and the baby was fine and my wife was fine we found out later thatit only took 28 seconds to get the baby out from the time that the anesthetic was administeredthe last thing that my wife remembers before falling asleep was hearing someone say are you ready with the knifeit was just a crazy situation but in the end it all turned out okay and everyone is fine and healthy

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Analysis

I used Google Docs on my Chromebook to record this oral version of the story of my daughter’s birth.  I used the ‘dictation’ feature on the Chromebook to complete this exercise.   One of the main ways this text is deviant from written English is its lack of punctuation.  It is possible using the tech that I used to add punctuation orally – but this would not be how I would “tell” the story orally.  So there is a complete void when it comes to punctuation.  Along with this lack of punctuation, there is also a lack of proper capitalization when it comes to the first word in each sentence.  This lack of punctuation and capitalization leads to a totally incorrect sentence structure which makes it challenging for a literate reader to follow the flow of the story.

I was impressed with the dictation software to get most of the words I spoke down correctly.  There are a few incorrect words, but I would estimate that it got over 95% of the actual words correct.  At times while I was speaking it would initially insert one word, but then as I continued to speak it would realize that it had incorrectly ‘heard’ me based on the context of what else I said and it would make corrections on its own.  Very impressive!

The most prevalent mistake besides the punctuation and capitalization is the spacing of the words.  The dictation software had a very quick ‘timeout’ so if there were any pauses in my thought process while I was speaking – it would cut out and I would have to re-press the record button.  But it would not add any spaces in between the previous word and the new thought so the reader is left with a lot of words mashed together to decipher.  I consider this to be a ‘mistake’ because 1) the conventions of our written English say so, and 2) because it makes it more difficult (and thus more time-consuming) for our brain to process the information because often one must pause to ensure that they are dividing up the combined words properly.

The few other minor mistakes were made which I would group into two categories: 1) improper spelling of a few words or random capitalization of words, and 2) occasionally the wrong word was inserted (rarely) because the word that was used sounds very similar to the word that I actually spoke.  This second grouping would be considered a mistake for obvious reasons (it’s not the proper word!) but the first grouping could only really be considered ‘mistakes’ of convention, not in meaning.  Because it’s still very obvious in these cases what I was trying to get across in the story.

I think if I had scripted the story that it actually would have ended up much longer.  After I ‘told’ the story, I remembered many other small details that I could have included….which could have helped to create a more ‘complete’ picture in the minds of readers of how the events of the story actually transpired.  I think I also would have told a couple things in a different order in order to improve the flow of the story somewhat.  I also think that if I would have created a script that I would have ended up pausing much less and the dictation software would not have been able to kick out so many times and this would have reduced the number of missing spaces that occur in the story.

I think the biggest differences I’m noticing between oral and written storytelling is the emotion that is lost in the story when it’s written (especially in this manner).  If I was to tell this story orally, in person – I would use so many changes in tone and manner to convey the gravity of the situation, and the speed at which things were happening.  But all that is lost in a text version such as this.  As one reads this version of events, it almost sounds robotic and callous in the way it is presented at times.  This really helps me to see and understand the need for the invention of punctuation (and more modernly, emojis)!  It’s fascinating to me that we literate beings have crafted so many ways to try and capture emotion in the written form and now I really see how that would have come to be a thing as those 106 cultures (Ong, 2002, p.7) developing a written language eventually began to create literature.  So interesting!

References

Ong, Walter, J. Taylor & Francis eBooks – CRKN, & CRKN MiL Collection. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York; London: Routledge.