I work as a teacher, and have recently discovered the joys of using dictation software to comment on student papers – it’s a HUGE timesaver over handwriting comments! However, I’m slowed down when commenting on punctuation.
For example, if I say “You need a comma to separate these two clauses”, what comes out is “You need a, to separate these two clauses.” Do you know of a way to make Microsoft’s dictation software write the spoken word “comma” (or other punctuation words) as the actual word?
I seem to recall, from yeas ago when I used Dragon’s Naturally Speaking software, that you can say the command “start spelling” and then spell the punctuation name. But that might be a bit cumbersome for your purpose.
I suspect that the simplest solution is to type it in afterwards. I have used Dragon quite a lot and there are always some errors that need to be corrected.
I think you can spell it out:
“You need a cee oh em em ay to separate these two clauses.”
It might come out as an all caps word, but I think that’d be easier to see and correct than just the punctuation mark.
I run into this sort of thing when I dictate on my Android phone-- texts, emails, and/or notes.
I’ll say, “plans for today colon” and sometimes I get the punctuation mark “:” and sometimes I get the word “colon” written out. I haven’t figured out how to consistently get the punctuation mark.
Something I do with names in Word is to dictate a short nonsense code like “cm” and afterwards, do a search and replace for the word or symbol you want.
Thanks for the suggestions! saje is correct that spelling out a word yields all caps. I also like bob_2’s suggestion of just saying a code, then doing a find/replace.