I was first intrigued by Nicole’s post for our text-to-speech task because she used the notes app on her phone to dictate her speech and I truthfully was unaware of this capability on my phone. I also found Nicole’s analysis of her phone’s inability to dictate very well gripping and comical.

Nicole remarks that as a perfectionist, she has mastered the use of punctuation and she was shocked to see that her phone’s voice-to-text technology did not pick up on this. As an English major myself, I too feel frustrated when I see lack of punctuation and grammar rules in Nicole’s voice-to-text piece. When reading about the Origins and Forms of Writing  by Schmandt-Besserat and Erard, I was shocked to learn that it wasn’t until the late 20th century that there was even an interest in perfecting writing systems and, “this interest led to the publication of encyclopedic works on writing systems. These were novel because they collected language, writing, and cultural experts and combined these with state-of-the-art advances in computer printing that allowed all the characters in numerous writing systems to be printed (2007, p.20).

Today, as scholarly students, and those who work in various areas of the education system, we are so used to seeing heavily edited, curated pieces of literature that sometimes we forget, or may be entirely unaware, that this has not been the case. The origins of communication was simply to do that, communicate. As society evolved and transformed, communication began to have a more complex set of rules and guidelines.

References

Schmandt-Besserat, D., & Erard, M. (2007). Origins and forms of writing. In C. Bazerman (Ed.), Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text (pp. 7-26). Routledge.