“Okay I think you can start once upon a time there was a narwhal who is friends with a unicorn he do narwhal and then one day sound of evil fish robot the evil face robot had a laser that could make people become its servant so is that the the Narwhals friend and made him his servant the Narwhal was very sad he wanted his friend back so she went end call. Narwhals and then the Narwhals destroyed the robot in destroy the laser in the Narwhal had his friend back it’s a bit”

For this task I asked my daughter to dictate a story on my behalf. She is the age where she has a great capacity for oral storytelling but does not yet have the technical skills to write her stories down. I thought her developmental moment would add an interesting layer to the task. The fact that my scholarly reflections are so tied up in my parenting experiences (she also was central to my “bag” assignment) speaks to the experience of mothers sheltering at home. Her orality is not a primary orality as Ong describes, as she is able to read and prior to reading she was well versed in the concept of written books and western literary story structures. From an education technology lens, it was interesting to ask her about what was “wrong” with the text. It gave me pause to think about how this tool might help early writers to gain a better understanding of how to break their oral ideas into written sentences. I read the story back to her because she found it difficult to follow without proper punctuation. The lack of punctuation is the greatest “wrong” with the text. I noticed that even at moments where she took a long pause the software did not necessarily add a period. This indicates a difference in oral storytelling as compared to written storytelling. An orator can pause and the listener understands this to be the completion of the thought, even if it is not a grammatically complete sentence. Oral stories contain both run-on and incomplete sentences without the listener perceiving a catastrophic “mistake” in the form. In written English punctuation offers essential information that directly impacts how the reader deciphers meaning. One needs only to look at online arguments regarding the oxford comma to realize the perceived value of punctuation. In the above passage the “mistakes” that were most difficult for an early reader to overcome were lack of punctuation, repeated words, and misquoted words. I was impressed by how well the software translated her words into text and that this was possible in real time. My background is in Disability services. For years the assistive devices that could convert speech to text were expensive and often wildly inaccurate. It would be an interesting experiment to record a text-to-speech screen reader and play it back into speech-to-text software. Gnanadesikan writes about the degradation of meaning/content in oral passing of information from one individual to another. Writing was the first technology to be able to capture language out of the temporal and into a spatial medium. I wonder what would happen if the human element of computer writing technology is removed. How many iterations of text-to-speech speech-to-text would render the original content meaningless?