Lads and ladies,
Do any of ye use a dictaphone for taking notes or helping when writing. Just feeling ultra-lazy doing the Lit Review (AGAIN!!!!!)
If so, any tips???
Chri$t - I'm boreeedddddddd!

======= Date Modified 22 Sep 2009 17:37:00 =======
I do, for disability reasons - partly because I lose control of my hands/arms a lot and can't type, partly because my memory is really shot and I can speak things more quickly than I can type them up and forget them. I will often record my ideas for a section of a writing, that I have in my head but can't type up quickly enough. Or I will record my notes about what I've just read, again ditto. I also use the same technology to write talks, speaking them and recording them, then typing up the notes/content from that.

I also have speech recognition software, again for disability reasons, but it's very error prone and would be particularly bad at something like the lit review with all the unusual spellings of names. I hoped to rely on it if my arms stopped working too much, but it was too error prone and I spent even longer correcting things. Instead I've just had to work in very short bursts. Somehow I've managed to write my thesis despite all this.

Bilbo, you're sooooo impressive!

Fair dues Bilbo! There's me just thinking of using it for chronic laziness - keep up the good work.

I was thinking along the lines of voice recognition, but would think a PhD scattered with the occassional "Will ya ever f**k off?" or "What was this gobsheen on?" mightn't be acceptable. Might use the dictaphone for recording thoughts in the car as commuting a lot these days (gaff finally ready at the weekend, so if any of ye on for a few pints and some dodgy metal).

Just really frustrated between the whole "Do I need more papers and where did I see that point or do I just write whats in my head?" balance

Speech recognition requires a lot of training before it's anywhere close to accurate, so you'd have to factor that in. And even then it can produce a lot of mistakes, particularly if you are using words it doesn't understand, like people's names, obscure spellings etc.

I gave up on it, even though it should be able to help me a lot. I just found it better to type in really short bursts! But recording ideas works really well for me. I can speak my ideas far more fluently than I can type them. Then I can replay the recording and type up the ideas (rather than use speech recognition). I've usually forgotten much of what I'd thought of by then, and am quite impressed by some of the ideas I came up with! Thank goodness for the recording.