What I’m really curious about, though, is the value you can get out of roughly doubling my typing speed from 80 WPM to 160.
You can already talk at that speed or faster. Why not invest in a speech recognition program? Even if you think speech recognition isn’t up to par yet, it will be in a few years. You could at least test if you get any benefit from increasing your speed by speech recognition, before you invest time in learning stenotyping.
I’m a doctor, so I dictate a lot. The main advantage is quickly recording information I already have. I don’t think there’s much speed gain when you’re recording and coming up with stuff at the same time.
I’m an extremely visual thinker, and have a strong preference for communicating by typing. Very, very visual—to the point where I notice myself having difficulty expressing myself verbally. I do much better without the pressure to keep a verbal continuity going, and allowing myself to backtrack and edit as I go without mucking with how the communication turns out in the end.
I’m extremely visual too. Learning to dictate effectively was a weird experience and was significantly slower at first than typing (80 WPM). A five minute dictation could take half an hour the first few times. It took a few dozens of dictations before I got the gist of it. I bet it was still easier to learn than stenotyping.
These days I roughly visualize the text in my head while I’m dictating. Corrections can’t be as easily made on the fly because the text is produced afterwards by a human and not in real time by a computer. If you’re using a dictation program, you can quickly edit the text on the fly and combine typing and dictation, so the problems you’re imagining might be more surpassable than you think.
Of course, there are other downsides to dictation like nonprivacy and straining your voice, but being able to move freely is a nice upside. Would you like to be able to express yourself better verbally? You could see this as a chance to learn.
You can already talk at that speed or faster. Why not invest in a speech recognition program? Even if you think speech recognition isn’t up to par yet, it will be in a few years. You could at least test if you get any benefit from increasing your speed by speech recognition, before you invest time in learning stenotyping.
I’m a doctor, so I dictate a lot. The main advantage is quickly recording information I already have. I don’t think there’s much speed gain when you’re recording and coming up with stuff at the same time.
I’m an extremely visual thinker, and have a strong preference for communicating by typing. Very, very visual—to the point where I notice myself having difficulty expressing myself verbally. I do much better without the pressure to keep a verbal continuity going, and allowing myself to backtrack and edit as I go without mucking with how the communication turns out in the end.
I’m extremely visual too. Learning to dictate effectively was a weird experience and was significantly slower at first than typing (80 WPM). A five minute dictation could take half an hour the first few times. It took a few dozens of dictations before I got the gist of it. I bet it was still easier to learn than stenotyping.
These days I roughly visualize the text in my head while I’m dictating. Corrections can’t be as easily made on the fly because the text is produced afterwards by a human and not in real time by a computer. If you’re using a dictation program, you can quickly edit the text on the fly and combine typing and dictation, so the problems you’re imagining might be more surpassable than you think.
Of course, there are other downsides to dictation like nonprivacy and straining your voice, but being able to move freely is a nice upside. Would you like to be able to express yourself better verbally? You could see this as a chance to learn.