For this activity I used the software, Speechnotes.

Recording:

For task number 3 I would like to talk about a camping trip which I took when I was 19 years old during high school I’d never really had an opportunity to explore nature growing up in a city a lot of my experiences were based within the city so this was my first opportunity to really explore a lot of what the northwest of Canada has to offer so rather than going right into a high school after rather than going right into post-secondary school after high school I decided to take a year off and spend some time working and doing some travelling I thought it might give me more to offer in a post-secondary setting so that was the reason for my decision at the time I had a beat-up old Ford station wagon and I took that along with some camping gear and at the time I was really into graffiti and I wanted to travel around BC and Alberta to some of the cities and go paint some of the legal graffiti walls or skateboard parks so I packed up my stuff and left with very little planning and along the way I was just going to camp at various campgrounds or places like lakes or by Rivers and one of the places I Stalked at was just to the northeast of Oliver I just there was a number of small lakes and I stumbled on one that I thought was just absolutely beautiful there was a dock and there was nobody around it was off of Old Forest Service Road and really hard to find and so I posted up my my $0.10 decided to Camp there for a week or so and as I was staying there I had no I think I had been there for a few days at the time of Father and Son were showed up and started camping on the other end of the lake in the lake was about a kilometre wide so is a significantly big big lake and I couldn’t really see them on the other end but I would see them in their boats floating in in the lake and doing their fishing so when I was on the dock washing my dishes or just enjoying the view doing some drawing I would say hi and we kind of got to know each other and one day they asked me oh you should come come hang out with us for a beer and a campfire and we’ll we’ll do a barbecue and get to know each other I said all that’s that’s a great idea so one evening maybe around 6 after we still incredibly light out because this is in the summer I biked to the other end of the lake which was a km on this little Trail and  we had a barbecue barbecue account fire we cooked up some of the fish that they had caught and we had a number of years and just got to talkin hello so we got to talking and getting to know each other we had a really great night I had a number of beers enjoyed the sunset but the more we talk the darker it got until eventually it was Pitch Black and I kind of had it on the back of my mind but how was I get a get back to my tent in the dark and so I had only my bike Lantern and a hatchet at the time for some reason and I haven’t said this before but I found out that this Lake was all actually called Bear Lake and it was renowned for the large amount of bears that lived around the lake and that they were really everywhere and I had had many encounters with bear as well staying there and I was a bit nervous about this commute in the middle of the night from one side of the lake to the other so I I said my goodbyes and thank yous to the father and son for supplying some beer and fish and a good come and good company and I started on my way and I was on my my bike on this rough Service Road biking around and I had my Lantern in one hand and I had a hatchet in the other hand on my bike in the middle of the dark and I must say this is probably the scariest I’ve ever felt in my life and I think to this day this is the case and I as I biked I I could hear noises in the bush and I was just really concerned and I noticed up ahead that there was a set of eyes kind of glowing in the bushes on the side of the the trail and it wasn’t really wasn’t that I could actually see its eyes the eyes but it was that kind of glimmer of the of the eyes and I decide I tried to make a lot of noise try to scare it away but it wouldn’t move so I I didn’t know exactly what it was I figured it wouldn’t it wasn’t a deer because deer is would likely run away with the the noise so I kept going and I noticed another set of eyes and I kept on getting closer and closer until I was about 10 metres away from the sets of eyes and I at this point I was making as much noise as I could to try and get them to go away and eventually I decided to just ride my bike is quick as I could and just get past these sets of eyes and I put it in to talk gear and rode as fast as I could on the farthest part of the path that I could get on away from these eyes and just booted it past and as I was going by I looked for some reason looked into the eyes and I noticed it was two bears just kind of being on the side of the trail and that’s all I noticed and eventually adjust nervous as heck made it back to my Campground gone into my tents and I don’t know how much sleeping I did that night but I was very grateful for still being around and that is my five-minute story

– How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?

After reviewing my voice to text transcript, I noticed many obvious deviations of the conventions of written English. Punctuation, sentence structure and capitalization are consistently incorrect or missing altogether. Without the use of punctuation and capitalization, the script looks like an enormous long winded run-on sentence. Words that are not supposed to be capitalized are capitalized.

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

In regard to capitalization, names and places such as Canada, Ford, Bear Lake are properly capitalized. But other words like Lantern, Pitch Black, Stalked (“stopped”), Rivers, Father and Son are incorrectly capitalized. I understand that the software misinterpreted these words for names or places, hence the capitalization.

Very little punctuation. No periods, commas. Most apostrophes are included.

Incorrect translations included:
“$0.10” instead of “Tent”
Years – beers

Fillers that I used while telling my story like “um” and “ahh”, were translated as “I”, “my” or “as”.

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

Most of the “mistakes” seem to be in regard to the conventions of the English language previously mentioned. Even with many “mistakes”, the text is still understandable. I question by whom these conventions of the English Language were invented and why. As stated in Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011), standards of written language influence our sense of “proper” language. But writing is not language, nor is it necessary to language.” (p.4)

I recall studying bohemian culture during my undergrad, in particular authors, artists and poets such as Ginsberg, Bukowski and Kerouac. I found the idea that “First thought, best thought”, was liberating to my art and writing processes. I often worried about the conventions of writing so much that it instilled a fear, hindering creativity and draining the writing of its spontaneity. Why are these characteristics of the text considered “mistakes”? Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011) explains “writing is associated with education, and education with wealth power.”(p.4) Perhaps the standards and rules of writing are rooted in deeper social structures. I think that writing styles that break the traditional rules are often labeled as low-brow and dismissed as credible works. 

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

In Walter Ong’s excerpt from Orality and Literacy, he states “Everytime you tell it will be a little bit different.” The story I used for this assignment is one I’ve told many times, and each time a little bit differently. The event took place over 15 years ago, so naturally my perception of the events have altered with age. Perhaps it is due to me forgetting or leaving out details, or remembering more and adding details, unscripted storytelling is a more organic process. For example, I forgot to mention the lake’s name at the beginning of the story, so recognizing mid-story, I attempted to tie it into the story’s conclusion. If this were a scripted story, the details would be organized in the same order, preserved in time.  Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011) explains” Writing arranges the message in space, each word following the previous one in a line. Writing is therefore a process of translating time into space.”(p.3) Personally, I found unscripted storytelling helped engage my creative process. Although reading from a script may have been more concise, orderly and efficient, it is less spontaneous and exciting for the storyteller.

– In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling? 

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011) discusses the concept that text is like a time machine, “pristinely preserved”. The chapter goes on to describe oral storytelling like the game “telephone”. Story’s contents evolve and transform almost like a living entity. The teller of the story can play just as an important role as the story itself. As a teacher, so much of delivering content is in our gestures, tone of voice, and inflection. Much of my personality is missing from the story’s manuscript. 

When teaching drawing skills to my students, I encourage them to draw from life rather than photographs or screens. The reason for this is not about the final product, but rather to focus on the process. The process of drawing from life creates a relationship between the artist and it’s subject, whether it being a person, a place or an object. The process is just as important as the outcome. I feel similarly about the difference between oral and written storytelling. The act of listening to someone tell a story, whether on the bus, at the bar, in a classroom, or around a campfire, a relationship or bond is formed between storyteller and listener.

When imagining an oral storyteller, I immediately think of my late uncle. He was an incredible fisherman, and an even better storyteller. I can’t imagine I would feel the same powerful emotions if I were to read the stories he told me in a book. There were subtitles in his performances that made the stories his own. Through the process of listening and engaging with him while he told stories, a new significant story was created in itself.

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internetLinks to an external site. (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10).