QWERTY versus Dragon

Over the years, I've found that the people who have the hardest time learning to use NaturallySpeaking are those people whose once healthy fingers could fly across the keyword churning out reams of correctly spelled and spaced text. If they did happen to type the wrong letters, some kind of muscle memory residing in their dexterous fingers would, without a thought, backspace the offending letters, quickly wiping them away so that they could continue on relentlessly filling pages with black characters.

When these people first start using NaturallySpeaking they find it torturous to command the software to correct its mistakes, tedious to spell the wanted word before finally, finally being allowed to accept the correct choice - leaving them irritated and mentally exhausted.

Fortunately, I never had to overcome the curse of being an extremely proficient typist (or any kind of positive adjective that might describe a typist). From an early age I wanted to be an Artist. Part of this aspiration involved steering clear of any classes that might teach me something that could be useful in the "real world" - a place I had decided I would never reside.

While my classmates filed off to typing classes, I smeared paint across flat services. While they slavishly worked their way through Mavis Beacon lessens, I sought enlightenment by pushing clay into shapes it didn't really want to be in. Years later, while these bourgeois drones made pronouncements like, "I just cashed in my stock options. Would you rather go to Belize or Curaçao?" I would exclaim, "Would you like soup or salad with that?"

Predictably, I did end up living on the outskirts of the real world, in an office filled with phones and faxes and computers with keyboards. Because I never took the classes to unlock its secrets, the QWERTY keyboard looked to me like an anagram word jumble of epic proportions. Imagine my delight in being able to use speech recognition software. I had a pretty good idea of how to talk as I'd been practicing that skill for 30 years. Now I could strap on a headset and let some magic force outside myself take care of the hunting and pecking.

If Dragon made mistakes, I was lenient. It still far outreached my capabilities with the incomprehensible keyword. I didn't mind if when writing e-mail to my boss intended to begin with "Dear Renee," Dragon might choose to write "deer urine coma." I could happily and efficiently correct this unfortunate medical condition, all the while keeping my clumsy fingers out of harm's way on my desk.

Inability is bliss!

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