I still remember the day when I was talking with a friend in college who was an English major and loved writing articles. I was an Electrical Engineering major and I hated writing articles. I could not understand how this person could love writing long form articles. In my mind, it seemed like a torturous thing to do.
Many years have passed since that conversation and I now produce many articles or blood a month. Some of them you might argue are too long 😊.
So how did that happen? How did I become a writer ?
Well, to be honest, the truth is that I still don’t ‘write’ for the most part. I talk.
Let me explain…
I have been speaking on various topics in classes as a trainer and speaking at conferences as a speaker all the world.
The first official class I taught was on C Sharp in Buffalo Grove, Illinois back in 2002. Since then, I have produced curriculum and taught in person as well as virtual multi-day courses online more than a few hundred times on many different subjects.
On the other hand, I have been speaking at conferences since November 2006 when I first presented a session in Las Vegas on the concept of SharePoint Excel Services.
Since then I have been speaking on all kinds of topics related to technology and sometimes psychology of employees in organizations.
Needless to say, I’ve done a Lot of speaking over the years and enjoyed all of it since I love the process of transferring the knowledge that I am acquiring to other people.
My conundrum was that I wanted to be able to replicate this transfer of knowledge through text as well so I could reach folks who love consuming this information through the written word.
So how do I do that if I don’t enjoy the traditional form of putting fingers to the keyboard to generate the text…?
That’s when I discovered the speech to text functionality within the Google and then the Microsoft ecosystems – the two technology companies that I utilize the most in my personal and professional lives.
And my life changed forever…
I now use the speech to text function everywhere! In fact it is my preferred mode of “writing”.
I use it to:
- Compose text messages
- Write emails
- Transcribe articles
- Write down my notes
- And everything else in between that would have required my fingers before
Don’t get me wrong, I still end up using my hands to massage the writing after I have done the initial brain dump using my voice. But that still is for me so much better than writing the whole thing using the keyboard.
So there you have it, the secret to how I became a writer (or a ‘voicer’… Is that such a thing?)