Writing with the mouthvoice dictation as writing practice

Abstract

According to Barthes, the intellectual is constantly asked to transcribe the oral presentation he has made, as if that did not pose any problem. He does it through a writing and editing exercise, never as a mere transcription. I have made various presentations in which I proposed a voice dictation system that allowed me to do exactly that: transcribe my oral presentation into digital text. The resulting text have been a formless mass relegated to the background, due to the unavoidable presence of a speaker right there. To write this article, I recover the same system, this time facing the challenge of maintaining a writing register that favors the printed text, but writing it with the mouth, completely altering orality. The particularities of voice dictation (comprehension level of the machine, volume, speed and diction of the speaker, length of pauses, enunciation of punctuation marks...) cause both expressions, oral and written, to be altered by elements of the other: the voice embodies silent paralinguistic expressions (dot, comma, hyphen), while the text registers errors of speech and listening (lapsus, repetition, correction). This article gives an account of the slippings caused by this way of writing.