We academics should be obsessed with the amount of stuff that we write, and it could be that one bottleneck of our output is simply the speed at which we type. We have provided some tools to help you write faster (see our review of an autocompleter here), but actually audio could be a very good tool to get your ideas into a more manageable form, which could be text or it could be simply an audio file. For example, it’s very, very easy to do a brain dump using audio. You just start talking about the idea that you just had and try to put it in a way that sounds reasonable that you go to other people, play it, and they will understand what you are saying.

In that sense, it is a lot better to use audio because you speak at a speed that is a lot higher than your typing speed. 

Actually this post has been dictated into Audacity, which is a free software that I use for dictating. One of the things that mainly changed my mind and made me try dictation was Peter Fisher’s Podcast series; Peter Fisher is a professor at MIT, and he has a series of Podcasts on Academic Productivity. I seriously would recommend his stuff in my review here; I think he has plenty of very valuable advice in his Podcasts. But anyway, I want to go through the advantages of using audio as a means to take your ideas down to paper at the same time.

The first advantage is that audio forces linearity on you. When I write text, I can jump freely around; I can go to the introduction, then add to the end of the paper; I can work on the Methods section, go back to the intro, then back to Method and so on. This is not something that you can do with audio; you really have to start from point A and run all the way to point Z. This could be an advantage or it could be a disadvantage, but for short ideas like a Blog post or just a quick note, this should be an advantage.

[Read more...]