Saturday, April 17, 2010

Dication Fail

To survive through law school exams, my hands need to be ready to somehow manage typing an exam upon which my entire grade depends for three hours straight. Granted, I get a little bit of extra time because I have a "disability," but that barely makes up for how my hands slow down at typing as they start to hurt. It doesn't give me much time to rest my hands during my exams. 

Which is why, the week before finals, I really need to be taking care of my hands. Resting and preparing for the hard work they are going to do. Unfortunately, my attempts at this are failing somewhat.

Up to this point, my Mac Speech Dictate dictation program has been extremely useful. All I had to do was put the headset on and read out loud and the computer would type my notes for me. Occasionally it would make a mistake, but for the most part the notes were still very useful. And using the dictation software saved my hands from a lot of typing.

Recently, though, the dictation program has been totally failing at writing down what I say. I have no idea why. Has my voice changed somehow? I did all of the voice training again, but it didn't seem to make a difference. Is something wrong with the microphone? It seems to hear me just fine. It just writes down something different than what I actually said. For example, here is the sentence I just read out loud from my environmental law casebook:
The enactment of the Clean Water Act of 1972 reflected a fundamental shift away from a water quality-based approach to pollution control toward an approach that emphasized technology-based effluent limitations.
And here is what my computer typed
we clean water 1972 reflected a fundamental shift way water quality based approach to pollution control the approach that emphasizes the elegy-based limitation
If I go back and read that later, I'll have no idea what it means!!! And I don't really have time to screw around with trying to fix whatever is wrong with the dictation program. I've probably wasted too much time on it already!!

In fact, I probably should be reading and outlining instead of blogging, now that I'll need to type all of my notes....

Crap. If I disappear off the face of the internet for several weeks, you'll know why.

1 comment:

~kelly marie~ said...

Wishing you lots of luck in your exam prep! Sorry the dictation machine has decided to not listen to you!