Editing Skills: the Insert, Push, and Delete Technique
This is an important editing voice-on lesson. Feel free to print it out and make it available to your students. We recommend that this lesson be taught after Exercise 61 Insert Before & After & Dates in the Nifty 58.(Note: It will also fit nicely into Training Capsule 44, Exercises 92-98.)
Lesson Overview
Explain to your students that this lesson reviews how important it is to speak in complete phrases and sentences. Armed with that understanding, it is suggested that it may be faster to edit by positioning the insertion point, re-dictating entire sentences, pushing the unwanted text down automatically as you speak, and then deleting the mistaken phrases as either full sentences or full paragraphs. The technique is called "Insert, Push and Delete."
The Importance of Complete Phrases and Sentences
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a continuous speech recognition program. This means that part of its accuracy is derived from analyzing sentences and phrases rather than individual words. If you speak in phrases, or ideally, in complete sentences, Dragon has a better chance of getting it right.
Failure to speak in complete phrases and sentences will result in decreased accuracy in part because Dragon analyzes sentences with a "grammar analysis" of sorts. This analysis tries to make sure that the various parts of speech are being voice-typed correctly. This is why it can do a fairly accurate job with homonyms, such as those seen this sentence:
Mr. Wright will write the right instructions on the board.
(Note: “Mr.” determines the word Wright will be voice-typed. The word “will” increases the chances that “write” will appear. And “the” mathematically increases the chances that the word "right" will show up.)
The Implication for Voice-Editing
Knowing that Dragon likes complete sentences also impacts voice-editing strategies. We all create first drafts that we think our brilliant, but after a little proofreading we realize serious editing may be required.
When making major edits, it is often much easier to simply restate an entire sentence rather than trying to edit individual words within a sentence.
Here's a quick example: For a recent textbook I quickly dictated a first draft paragraph. Follow along, step-by-step, how I fixed a paragraph in the editing phase using Dragon.
Step 1: Before beginning, use the * ADD WORD feature to train the word OneNote, the name of Microsoft's new notetaking software. (See the Nifty 58, Exercise 54 ADD WORDS)
Step 2: Dictate the following paragraph. Correct all the mistakes using your voice after you finish the entire paragraph.
OneNote is like a big storage facility for all of your study and research materials. Even if you throw all of your information into OneNote in a haphazard manner, the software has the tools necessary to help you quickly locate and retrieve what you need to remember.
Step 3: After proofreading, it was decided to change the tone of the second sentence because I don't want to imply that students should take notes in a haphazard manner. Say:
- INSERT AFTER Even if you
Step 4: Now, rewrite the paragraph by saying:
create thousands upon thousands of notetaking pages for dozens of classes, OneNote has the specialized tools to help you quickly locate and retrieve what you need to remember Period (.)
- NEW PARAGRAPH
- DELETE PARAGRAPH
Note: The NEW PARAGRAPH command pushes the unwanted text down and away from the corrected paragraph, and the DELETE PARAGRAPH command should deleted the unwanted text.
Step 5: Try this same technique with a simple sentence. Say:
Hopefully, by working through the history chapter, you can see how OneNote can enhance your study of this course.
- INSERT BEFORE you can see how
you will learn how easy it is to organize your notes in OneNote Period (.)
- DELETE THE NEXT SENTENCE
- NEW PARAGRAPH