Unscripted storytelling using the Google speech recognition on voicetotext.org

Before I start talking about how I prepared my middle child Caitlin her name is Caitlin for her kindergarten this year you have to understand her personality and how she was attending when attending our daycare Caitlin started her daycare at Age 2 and 1/2 and her older sister Allison went there together for about a year before she went off to kindergarten during the last three years of going to the daycare Caitlin was very nervous to be separated from me and cried at drop off almost every morning so basically she hated good to go anywhere away from me because of her separation issue Caitlin was not able to participate in any extracurricular activities she was very interested she is very interested in sports such as skating gymnastics that’s swimming God since these programs require kids at age over 5 to attend without parents she was unfortunately not able to enjoy it too. She is interested in I understand. It is. It is common for young kids to be nervous and new environment but she is so different from my job first child Alison when she was at Caitlin’s age so it was a bit challenging for me and my husband as we were not able to make my make Caitlin you feel comfortable safe and happy sometimes I think maybe the anxiety and depression issues caused by be perfect breastfeeding her too long until she turned a 15 months . so it has been over two weeks now since she started kindergarten this month and she cried when you first 2 days last week and she tried standing against the wall and waited for the start belt so it’s surprising me she’s been doing she’s been doing so much better than what the anticipated but she is still or she still gets nervous in the morning and as the weekend gets closer to Monday so there are about two things that we’ve have tried to prepare Caitlin to be successful in kindergarten first thing is to talk about fun things about kindergarten and bake basically the school in general so since her older sister is already attending the school that she is attending she’s starting so we talked about fun things School events playground Parks anything interesting things dad kids do in in the school and also sometimes we go to we go to the school on the weekends just to see the school the building to get her to be more comfortable in the environment second thing that we did was to talk about her emotions why she’s nervous and why she’s about to cry so we asked her to talk to talk to us when she get nervous and when she’s about to cry so he asked her to talk about what kind of emotions and what kind of Heelys she is experiencing so so that we can come up with some solutions that we can help her feel better and safer so every morning I asked her how she’s feeling are you nervous what is what kind of emotions do you have inside your belly. That’s what I asked and she sometimes tells me she’s nervous nervous because there is no one she knows and she feels that there’s going to be no friends that she can play indoor recess time  and then I asked her if I  I could give her a hug to to help her feel better and that has been working well too 2 to help her cope with her anxiety and a separation issues so so far Caitlin has been very positive about going to school and she even said she can try going to to a gymnastic class by herself. so whatever we’ve been trying to help our nervous middle child to be successful in a new environment has been successful and now we are working tours to helping her be more independent

Analysis:

The transcript text is different from the written English in its organization and details of the story. Even though I had thought about the topic and the contents of my story beforehand, as soon as I hit the microphone button on the program, I became under pressure to come up with what I was going to say next as my story continued. There were frequent pauses and Ums and Ahs in the recording which fortunately were not transcribed to the text. If my story was scripted, then it would have been more organized and included more descriptive details to improve the story more interesting.

Despite the pressure and spontaneity required, when storytelling orally and unscripted, it takes only the duration of your speech to complete the task (here I took 5 minutes to tell the story). On the other hand, if the story was scripted, it would take longer than 5 minutes to brainstorm, organize, write, proofread, edit, and practice the written text to deliver the story more effectively to its audience. After listening to Walter J. Ong’s lecture excerpt saying writing changed how people talk and how people organize their thoughts (Abe Aboud, 2014). I think that one of the reasons why literate people tend to take longer time to write a text is that they want to produce written pieces in similarly sophisticated ways that they have read and heard before, otherwise they do not look and sound educated and do not fit into the world that they live in.

The most common mistake in my text is the absence of punctuations and it made the whole story written in one single sentence. I consider this the most critical mistake because it makes hard to understand and follow the story in the transcript form. Even if I made a clear pause during the speech to indicate an end of a sentence and a start of a new sentence, the program was not able to detect my intention, unless I would specifically state the name of punctuations, such as period, comma, exclamation mark, or question mark.

Another common mistake is repetition of words or phrases in the text. As the story was recorded unscripted and required spontaneity to come up with what I was going to say next, there were some moments where I spoke the same sentence all over again or repeated some words and phrases to buy myself some time to think the next part of the story.

Imagine a person with a speech or language disorder was using a speech-to-text program. The outcome of the transcript text would contain numerous repetitions and other “mistakes” and the readers of the text would not know if these mistakes were intentional, accidental, or program errors. If the story was delivered orally, the audience would understand the underlying conditions and it would help the audience to comprehend information in this unique setting.

Also, I believe that scripted or unscripted oral storytelling has benefits of conveying the speaker’s emotions in facial expressions (visual storytelling) and in voice (audio storytelling) which will enhance the story than when it is delivered in the written form.

Reference: 

Abe Aboud. (2014, September 8). Walter Ong – Oral Cultures and Early Writing [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvF30zFImuo&t=360s