Haven't tried this yet (but my husband used it about 12 years ago) but am going to give it a go.

Reason for posting is that Amazon has the student version on offer at the moment for £60 which looks a pretty good price compared to list or other student software sites.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dragon-NaturallySpeaking-Preferred-Education-Version/dp/B001C0LR68/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1278324626&sr=1-15

Wal kindly erm hooked me up with a copy earlier in the year. It has been useful for admin tasks, but I would say (as I was told at the time) its just not quick enough to write at the speed you can usually type for academic work. I found it was the corrections that took the time e.g. if you forget a comma it takes more time to go back and add it than normal typing.

Ah... that's a shame - I followed the link and got very excited! I've developed quite bad RSI in my wrists and am worried about how I'll cope as the amount of writing I have to do builds up. I can't afford to get anything like that til the next bursary payment (in Oct lol) so I'll be interested to see how Jepsonclough gets on too. It says that it can write at 3x typing speed - maybe that's 3x a very slow typing speed? I need to do something though as typing a paper just kills me :-(

I haven't got the most patience in the world, so maybe if you stuck at the training more it would become a lot quicker, but I think it would take a month to train up properly and for me that was too much time out of my PhD.

Stressed- Have you got a gel wrist rest? Have you tried a wrist support? or deep heat on your hand? Make sure you are sitting directly in front of your computer, so your hands aren't twisted round.

Ah, maybe I was wrong about the wrist pad

http://www.rsi.deas.harvard.edu/preventing.html

I used it sometimes for writing up notes when I was doing my PhD. I was living with my ex at the time and he would always laugh when he got home from work and I was talking to myself very slowly and succintly!

Training took quite a while but it was useful when I wanted to just make notes off the top of my head.