Dictation

is there a word in English for

dictée? Dictée is, what do you call it? It's basically like when the teacher, actually, I don't think they have this in English speaking schools.

Basically, like in order to kind of work on your grammar and everything the teacher will read like a story or something and you have to write it down and you can't make any spelling mistakes and it is so so very french and they choose like the most difficult texts and everything and for you to make mistakes and i think every kid is traumatized by it

and if you're really really bad they remove one point for each fault and it can even go under zero and if you go a negative you know you're

The seer had talked French all the time.

Dictées, lectures, le conscrit, Waterloo, la maison désert.

His careful voice reading on and on until the room disappeared.

She must do that for her German girls.

And I'm hearing that AI is involved in all of those too.

And maybe before I go all in with dictation, I want to make sure I'm not going to get rejected by Amazon or a traditional publisher.

And so if that's the knot in your stomach, this episode is for you.

Because there are real answers to these questions.

So here it is just real plain for us as authors because it gets so, so muddled.

If the machine wrote the words, you tell Amazon or your publisher that even if you polished it afterwards.

If you wrote the words, even by dictation, because that's still writing, and a machine just helped you tidy it up, you don't have to disclose that to Amazon.

However, you may need to disclose it to a traditional publisher.

The week after what? Well, that depends on you.

Maybe you were in my dictation bootcamp last week.

Maybe you just finished the five weeks with me going through the whole dictation draft framework.

And last Tuesday, we wrapped up the final letter.

Or maybe you came home from a writing conference back in the summer, or you took a class, or you went to a retreat, and you're still carrying the notebook from it around.

So the event was not the change.

The week after is the change.

That's why I wanted to do this episode today for you specifically, because some of you did finish my dictation bootcamp just this last week.

And there's the dictation layer.

He dictated the email.

Dictation produces spoken language, not written language.

more clauses more filler more sentences that trail off or loop back when you type you compress when you dictate you ramble and the rambling reads fine in your head because you can hear your own intonation in print the intonation's gone and the words just sit there so

what he's regretting isn't necessarily that the journalist misrepresented him it's that his own phrasing produced in a hurry through a medium that makes everyone sound more casual than they intend became public

Daniel's quote suffered from the dictation gap.

If he'd typed the same email, he'd have compressed it, edited it, caught the loose phrasing.

Dictation is fine for internal notes.

And look at where you are now.

We started off with D for devices, and you found out you already own everything you needed to start practicing your dictation.

R was for reps, and you started digging the trench, just reading preexisting work out loud, maybe dictating your morning pages, just getting in that practice with dictation.

A was for approach and you picked up your road into your story world and how you want to actually approach dictating your fiction.

And then last week we did F for fiction, where you practice speaking a whole sentence.

seen out loud, characters, dialogue, and all.

Which means that today we're not going to focus on learning dictation.

You have what you need to practice and get to mastery with dictation.