Now that you have discovered dictation blogging, you may be thinking that some people are just born fast talkers.
They just know how to speak at 200 or 250 words per minute.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Talking fast is not inborn, it is a skill. Some psychologists say that people who routinely talk quickly do so because they’re nervous.
Well, you’re not nervous, you want to intentionally learn how to talk faster because you want to create more content.
As I have written several times in this blog, why should you stick to typing out your blog posts, novels, articles, video scripts, and other forms of content when you’re trapped at 30 words per minute, all the way to 80 words per minute.
At most, you will be able to write 4800 words per hour. That may seem impressive, but if you factor in editing, you probably would be lucky to have a fraction of that, maybe 1500 words.
A lot of people who work for content companies barely manage 3000 words per day if you include research.
This is why learning how to talk faster is so so important.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re using a voice recorder, a dictaphone, podcasting mic, or a headset, the faster you speak, the more content you create.
The good news is, you don’t have to be born a fast talker, because like I’ve said, it is a skill.
And just like any skill, the more you repeat what you’re doing, the better you get.
Adopt the right daily rituals to learn how to talk fast
By simply going through daily practices, you will be able to speak much faster than your current rate. Keep in mind that you’re not trying to talk fast like an auctioneer, that’s not the point.
You want to speak fast enough so you can express your thoughts clearly.
Maybe you’re thinking at a rate of 1000 miles per hour but when you speak fast enough you will be able to at least get close to keeping pace with the speed of your thoughts.
The faster you think and the faster you talk, the more content you produce once your audio is transcribed.
The problem is, there is no one size fits all solution when it comes to daily fast-talking rituals. You’re not just spitting out words and into a microphone, you’re reading an outline, and thinking about the information that fills in the short sentences in that outline.
You have to think quickly and you have to speak fast enough to capture your thoughts so your 20 to 50 words in an outline get turned into a 3000 to a 5000-word article.
Sounds crazy? Sounds too good to be true?
I’ve done it. I’m doing it right now.
I’m dictating this blog post based on a few lines of text and if I’m able to pull this off, so can you.
My secret? I’ve adopted the rituals I’m sharing in this post for faster dictation.
I found out that different rituals work for different people, there is no one size fits all magic bullet solution and no ritual works for all people at all times and in all circumstances.
I’m just going to list down the rituals that worked for me.
Feel free to tweak them and make modifications so you can level up your thinking and speaking speed.
Both of these have to operate together so you can become a very fast and effective dictation speaker.
I don’t care if you are dictating blog posts, articles, novels. video scripts or any other type of content, adopt the right daily speaking rituals and you will be able to level up your speed.
Clear Your Mind
The first ritual that I adopted involves intentionally clearing my mind. I look forward to when I speak in front of a microphone. I make sure that my mind is clear enough, so it can focus on the outline I will be using during the dictation.
To make this happen, I do breathing exercises.
I breathe in slowly and deeply, then I breathe out. When I do this, between the intervals, I enjoy the silence and neither am I worrying about stuff that has yet to happen nor agonizing over things that happened in the past.
My mind is focused like a laser on the present moment.
This enables me to clear whatever emotional obstacles I have in what I’m about to do.
I let go of the fear of saying the wrong word at the wrong time.
I drop my apprehension about bad transcripts because I failed to mention something important.
By clearing my mind, I get a handle on the natural impatience I feel as I scroll through my outline.
All of that goes away and all I have is the present moment and it feels awesome.
Intentionally Clear Your Throat
A lot of people, right before they open their mouths for dictation, inadvertently clear their throat. You have to be intentional – repeatedly clear your throat.
When you do this, your mind aligns with your throat. It’s as if you’re sending a signal to your brain, “I’m about to talk now.”
Boost this link between mind and body by closing your eyes and breathing out.
At first, do this silently but after a few repetitions breathe out with a low hum.
Do this with your eyes closed and focused on the hum.
It’s as if your attention is lined up with what you are doing with your throat and vocal cords and this creates a powerful effect of being centered when you speak.
Do Some Stretching Before You Speak
You can stretch your neck, do some side stretching, or limber up. You can do whatever you normally do before a Zumba session.
Again, you’re trying to align or synch up your body, your mind, and your vocal cords.
All of these have to line up properly so you’re relaxed yet focused enough to dictate at a very high rate of speed with total mental clarity.
You’re just spitting out words for the sake of packing as much text into a transcription.
I’m telling you, if that is your objective you are wasting your time because that transcription is going to be 99% garbage.
You’re going to spend a tremendous amount of time editing that transcript.
It would feel like you are sifting through a mountain of coal just to retrieve tiny bits and pieces of diamonds, it’s not even worth it.
Your mind, your voice, and your body have to line up so you can say the right thoughts at the right time and at the right place to produce a solid gold transcript.
Do Unrecorded Dry Runs
When I first started dictation blogging, I used to hate it when I would unwittingly leave my mic off.
I would belt out horoscopes and even biographies of clients at 150 to 250 words per minute.
I’d look at my outline and see how far down I went. It felt really good and then I looked at my microphone and the red light was off.
That’s how much the sense of failure just overcomes me quickly followed by rage.
That’s how much I hated unrecorded dictations.
Well, it turned out that one of my most powerful daily dictaphone writing rituals is to do unrecorded dry runs.
Just turn off your mic or headset and do a freestyle.
There is no obligation and pressure.
You don’t have to lay out perfect, flawless, and fully-polished sentences, there is no need for that.
When you do unrecorded dry runs, you are clearing your mind of whatever emotional and mental blockages there may be that would slow you down and keep you from dictating clear, powerful, and effective texts.
What I would do is I would read a sentence on my outline and just do a freestyle.
I don’t care where my mind went as long as I’m fully developing the idea and the concept and I have a big picture view of where the outline wants me to go. I’m good.
I also make sure I follow a specific pattern.
I would work on truly fleshing out a clear picture, based on a few words of the outline.
Once I become familiar with the broad parameters of the themes, information, and possible topics in that outline, I start to speed up, explore many different possibilities, and then I mix things up.
I don’t care if I’m going to get it all perfect, because there is no destination. The point is to just get all the blockages out and just let the words and thoughts flow and smash into each other to create new combinations that would inspire me.
I just want to get the firm sense that I’m not a sloppy thinker and that I can see the big picture enough so I can dictate stuff that makes sense once it is transcribed.
As you see, when you’re doing unrecorded dry runs, you are wearing away any emotional objections you may have to what you’re doing.
Let’s face it, writing with your voice or through dictation is not how people normally produce articles, blog posts, and novels.
Most people would prefer using a keyboard or go old-school, pick up a pen, and write on a piece of paper.
I’m not knocking on those, but the more you focus on “what is normal”, the harder you make it on yourself.
So, there are these internal blockages that you just have to workaround.
But by doing unrecorded dry runs, with no emotional attachment or expectation, you blow these out of your system.
Get On The Slippery Slope
Logically speaking, when I do under unrecorded dry runs, I try to make sure I hit a point where I get on a slippery slope.
Usually, when people say the phrase “slippery slope” they are being critical.
This is an old logical fallacy where people assume that if certain conditions are present, then it would always lead to the worst-case scenario.
Most of the time, that doesn’t happen, but people do think this way.
The good news is, you’re using the slippery slope concept in dictaphone writing or writing with a voice recorder to produce clearer thoughts that can be transcribed into quality content.
In other words, you’re intentionally trying to get into a slippery slope because it’s a good thing in this context.
How does this work out? Well, you start with one thought and truly hammer it.
That’s right. You pursue the idea of a full logical conclusion.
You begin with who, what, where, when, how, and then after enough questions are thrown at it and the more you flesh it out, the “Why?” and “How come?” fall into place.
At that point, you finally nail it.
Your next mission is to remember where you began.
Go back to the same thought, and go down another route. This is how you become a more creative thinker.
A lot of people are under the impression that there’s only one way to think of certain topics or ideas.
That’s an illusion.
There’s always at least one other way to look at any kind of idea.
When you’ve fully hammered it using an alternative route, repeat it again and again and again. The great thing about this slippery slope daily dictation ritual is that it forces you to trust yourself.
By understanding that there are no right answers from the get-go, you free yourself from clamping up and feeling stuck. You’re so afraid that you will say the wrong things and the transcript will just be useless so slow down, the ideas dry up, and it’s such a pain to go through the outline.
However, when you practice the intentional act of getting on one slippery slope after another, that fear goes away. You learn to take confidence in your ability to make sense.
Also, one of the biggest payoffs of this warm-up technique is that it also prevents you from editing yourself.
This is the main reason why I switched to dictation blogging.
When I was writing by hand, I couldn’t get things done precisely because I wanted every single word and sentence to be perfect.
I would barely write a paragraph then I would go back to the beginning and scratch everything off because I had this fleeting idea that there’s a better way to write that paragraph.
I would go around in loops like a cat eating its tail.
It was sad and it wasted a lot of time.
But when I took up dictation writing, I learned how to be a more disciplined thinker because once I say something, it’s gone.
It’s going to be transcribed and I have to move on. This pushed me to stop editing myself.
If I’m going to edit myself through dictation, I would repeat the sentence with a slight variation at the end, but that’s pretty much it.
I don’t get stuck in a loop.
Watch Improv Comedy With Audience Participation
Improv comedy and writing through dictation have a lot in common. An improv comic doesn’t know in advance who is going to be in the audience.
Different audiences have different overall personalities and temperaments.
That’s why a comic who performs at a venue with let’s say, three shows a night is just spitting out the same material to three different crowds.
Each performance is precisely different because it is a reflection of each audience’s personality and mood.
This is why watching improv comics work with their audiences is so instructive for people who are learning how to “write with their voice”.
First, check out the banter.
Next. look at how the comic takes a suggestion from the crowd and runs with it.
At this point, I would pause the YouTube video and copy the same tangent of the comic but I will try to verbally flesh out the idea much faster.
I would then repeat it but differently and then I would repeat it and try to go in another direction.
I don’t care if I’m being funny because I’m not an improv comedian.
Instead, I’m a person who works with thoughts and how many different ways you can go with a single starting thought and how thorough the final picture created by your exploration will be.
It all has to be done quickly, with as many words as possible, and it has to make logical sense. I would then unpause after dictating for a few minutes to see what the comic would do next, click the pause button again, repeat the tangent, and try to go much faster.
Once the comedy video is over, I will then dictate the whole act but try to cover more territory and more topics.
Again, I’m not trying to be funny, instead, I’m trying to work using the same improvisational technique as the comic to explore as many different ideas as possible without spitting out gibberish.
Visualize Your Outline
Look at the outline that you’re working with. It may have a few sentences, a handful of words, or it can have complete paragraphs.
It doesn’t matter.
Adopt the daily routine of visualizing the outline.
Make it real in your mind’s eye and complete with vibrant colors, textures, faces, and places.
Once you reach that level of visualization which is fairly quick for most people, start with a big picture.
When you quickly read through your outline, what is the whole point of the topic?
For example, in this blog post, the whole point is to adopt a series of daily rituals that will help you think faster, clearer, and more effective as you do dictation blogging. What is the big picture?
It should jump out at you. If not, read the outline again and again until something pops off. Once you see the big picture, visualize it as best you can. Start with the who, what, where, when, and how.
Once you fill in enough details, start imagining or vision and visualizing the “Why?” and “How come?” When you do this you’ll quickly notice that there’s a large pattern, there’s a theme.
And this theme can be broken and applied to the different points of the outline. Visualize the theme and see how it repeats and works out when given new information.
But the theme remains the same.
I remember when I was dictating a book on buying and selling graphic art services.
The theme was, you would go to Fiverr to figure out who offers the best logos and small banners.
Then, you would find a buyer.
But, this is where the theme keeps repeating itself because there are buyers with healthcare websites.
So you repeat the theme and look for people with the logo skills for healthcare.
Also, some buyers are in the restaurant industry and the same theme plays out.
You go to Fiverr and look for people who have a portfolio related to a particular industry. You repeat this over and over.
The theme is the same – you buy low and sell high.
You look for people with superb graphic art skill sets who charge very little money and the profit is what’s left over when you pay your vendors.
You repeat the process again and again.
This is what happens when you visualize your outline because you zoom in on what remains the same and what is repeated over and over. Again, this can take the form of a paragraph on your outline or just a few words.
But, as long as you can nail the repeating process, you can then improvise and apply it to many different situations.
Thanks to this daily ritual, you can take an outline that started with 20 words and crank out 20,000 words.
If that sounds like a tall order? It isn’t, I’ve done it. Not just once, but many times. I’ve dictated over 200 books using this technique.
The Final Word On Daily Rituals
An ancient Greek philosopher once said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” You can become an expert dictation novelist, blogger, or writer by adopting a “one-time big-time attitude”.
It plays out this way, you realize that you have to write a lot of chapters tomorrow, you cram, whip out your microphone, and install an mp3 recorder or Dragon NaturallySpeaking and just start talking.
What you’re doing is you’re cramming and the stuff that you produced probably needs to be edited tightly for it to be any good.
9 times out of 10, more than 50% of what you’ve dictated has to be edited out due to low quality.
You don’t want to find yourself in that situation, that’s why you need to adopt the daily rituals that I’ve described above. You don’t have to religiously follow each ritual but I ask you to try them all out and stick to the ones that work for you.
Everybody’s different with our different preferences, I get that and I respect that. But start with what I described and stick to the ones that make sense to you.
How would you know? Well, when you adopt these rituals, they help you improve not only how many words you can speak in a certain period, but also the quality of the transcription of that dictation.
Stick to it, and you will eventually get to 20,000 or 50,000 words or wherever you want to go.
It all begins with a decision to start.
I wish you nothing but success.