My “talk to text” story with no editing:

My first teaching job was in Prince Rupert and I was originally hired for the head of the department for Math and Science and when I moved up there and started in the role their homak teacher had to go on on a leave so I had to fill in the spot and I had the choice of either of either teaching sewing or cooking cooking and the first recipe for the kids was chocolate chip cookies and I hadn’t really figured out the time it would take for them to actually read the recipe go through the steps and start baking and so the class was coming to an end in my Infinite Wisdom I just thought let’s turn up the Heavens so they can get your cookies done on time and of course that’s like the cardinal rule of something you shouldn’t do I thought maybe they would cook faster but here I was just a naive new teacher anyway I’ve been started smoking and the fire alarm went off and the entire school had to be evacuated and in Prince Rupert it one of the rainiest cities in Canada so we had 300 students outside on the lawn in the pouring rain as firefighters came and were searching the school for the cause of the smoke and it was determined that it was the chocolate chip cookie dough for the rest of the year I got the nickname Smokey Stevenson which I ironed definitely and it was a nice sense of community among the teachers and the kids had something to laugh about and put in their yearbooks when he graduated from the school but that wasn’t the only time that to my cooking went awry I had decided to teach them how to cook banana muffins and when I went to the store to do the grocery shopping there were no bananas in Prince Rupert because the shipment the truck and never made it past Terrace so they were literally No Bananas in the entire town and again being just fresh out of school first time I moved away from home I was in a panic and I remember phone in my mom from the grocery store asking her what should I do like I was completely frazzled and I didn’t know how to Pivot out of this situation beef so she talked me through a new recipe and it was like an apple brand kind of muffin or something cuz we had to use some of the ingredients that I already purchased thinking that I could just pick up bananas the day off so those are a few of my more humorous examples of my first teaching teaching job up in printer 

Analysis

How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?

My story deviates from the conventions of written English by its lack or misuse of punctuation and mechanics. A glaring omission are periods and commas. There is not one period or comma in the entire story. After I was done speaking, a comment box appeared over the microphone suggesting that I should say “period” or “comma” in order to include them in my story. I found this interesting because I wasn’t instructed to do this at the beginning. As I was sharing my story,  I made sure to speak clearly and pause at the end of sentences, thinking that the program would pick up on the need for a period or comma. ‘Talk to Text’ is a Google tool that I instruct my students, who have trouble with written output, to use. I assumed that it would be more sophisticated to pick up on the nuances in a reader’s voice in order to insert punctuation. However, I was surprised that the tool deciphered and capitalized proper nouns, like Prince Rupert, my last name, Canada, and Terrace. Contractions, like didn’t and I’ve, are also written correctly and include apostrophes. 

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

I’m surprised that there is only one word misspelled in my story; homak should be Home Ec. Other than that, the story is pretty accurate. There are a few random capitalized words like Heavens, No, Bananas, and Pivot. There are also incorrect words in sentences. For example, ‘Heavens’ should be heat, ‘he graduated’ should be they graduated and ‘printer’ should be Prince Rupert. However, I am impressed that my ‘ums’ are not recorded in the story! I did say ‘um’ quite a bit because I was talking off the top of my head. 

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

The most noticeable mistake is the lack of punctuation. They are few cases where future tense is used when it should be the past tense. I consider these grammatical errors and they do influence the meaning of the story.

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

If I had scripted the story, I think that I would have been very clear in speaking and wouldn’t have jumped from present to past tense as much. 

In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling? 

Oral storytelling is very different from written storytelling. As Water Ong mentioned in his lecture and his book, oral storytelling is about recall. People from oral cultures have formulas and ways to remember and share stories, but they are always told slightly differently (Ong, 2002).  I chose to share my story about teaching cooking in home economics because I had recently shared the story with a colleague and felt confident that I could recall enough details to talk for several minutes. This version of the story is slightly different from when I first shared it because I remembered the detail of it pouring rain and the faces of the students as they got soaking wet.

Also recently, my school invited a local indigenous Elder to share some of her culture’s creation stories with the students. As she began, she mentioned a very important protocol. As a knowledge keeper, she could share stories from her culture. But if you are not indigenous, then you are permitted to only share stories that have been written down and published. This way, you have a reference to consult if you have questions.

References:

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