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by estearum 10 hours ago
Seems much harder to learn how to write how you never write, versus just learning to speak to a computer the same way you speak to anything else.
2 comments

What do you mean how you never write? You can just write what for want to say instead of saying it out loud. It is not a special skill, it's no different than how you write a message, just that you don't hit backspace to go back and correct things.
Correct, it's no different from how you normally write, except for the ways in which it is. We agree.
When you're making a big deal out of it being "much harder" because it's "how you never write" and they're saying that's just "not hitting backspace"? No, you don't agree.
How frequently do you write in a stream of consciousness and not hit backspace?

Maybe give a ballpark estimate of characters typed per week in this manner versus characters typed where you are doing some combination of: 1) thinking about what you're writing before you write it, 2) punctuating and formatting correctly, or 3) correcting your writing output?

Ridiculous proposition. And I type correctly at 110+ wpm.

How often I do it doesn't matter because it's such a trivial thing to switch. If you're gonna "try it for a few weeks" the part of you that has to learn the typing-specific parts of that method is about 1% of the difficulty.

It's really easy to ignore typos. And the way you have to approach thinking and correcting is the same whether you're typing or voicing.

If you can't just type the way you would just talk, and you find it notably hard, it's you that's being ridiculous.

But it's literally not. You already correct yourself and revise your speech in an append-only rolling edit. You do it all day every day for decades.

Versus never writing in this way.

Have you tried the voice-based prompting, as I'm describing?

A lot of people on the autism spectrum can have issues with speaking or speaking speed, but have no such barrier necessarily to typing speed.

I'd imagine there's a statistically large number of people that meet that criteria on this website.

I mean we don't need to do any epidemiological studies here or anything.

If someone hasn't tried it, they should. It's probably quite different from how they're expecting, might be great, and costs basically nothing. Try it for a few days and if it doesn't work in your workflow, obviously don't do it.

But I have encountered many many people who raised these exact same arguments against trying it, then tried it, and were hooked within days. Exactly 0% of people I've ever convinced to try it decided it just wasn't for them and went back to typing full-time.

The thought of talking drives me insane but you do you, boo-boo :)