Superwhisper, Speaking Your First Draft
Nov. 6/26
I've been typing for a living longer than I'd like to count, and this week I put the keyboard down and talked. The habit was plain: dictate one seed post with Superwhisper instead of typing it. Press the shortcut, say the thing, let it turn into text on the Mac Studio, and see what comes out.
What came out first was a mess, and a useful one. I talk faster than I type, so the first pass ran long and loose, full of "and so" and "what I mean is" and sentences that started in one place and quit somewhere else. Superwhisper caught the words fine. It's remarkably good at that. What it can't fix is the thinking, and spoken thinking shows its seams in a way typed thinking hides. When I type, I fix a sentence before I finish it. When I talk, the sentence is already out in the room.
Here's the part I didn't expect. The spoken draft was more honest about what I actually thought. Typing lets me tidy a half-formed idea into something that sounds finished, and sounding finished is not the same as being finished. Out loud, I kept circling back to the same point three times, which told me exactly which point mattered. Nobody circles back to something that doesn't. I cut two thirds of the transcript, and what survived was the part I'd said most.
It also sounded more like me than my typed drafts do. Shorter words. Fewer ornaments. I'd have told you that was the voice I was already writing in, but reading the transcript back, I could see where the typed version puts on a collar.
It reminded me of the tailgate. Twenty-seven years of mornings, you stand at the back of the truck and tell the crew what the day looks like: which block, which rows, what to watch for. You do it in about two minutes and nobody misses a word. Then somebody wants it written up for the ledger, and the same information comes out stiff, longer, and somehow less clear. The tailgate version was the real one. The ledger version was the record. Both have their uses, but they aren't the same thing, and I'd been treating my typed drafts like the tailgate when they were mostly the ledger.
Dictation has costs, and I'll say so. I couldn't find a quiet room on Wednesday and learned fast that I don't talk freely when somebody might hear me. Editing a transcript is also slower than editing something I typed carefully, because there's more of it and less of it is good. The cleanup ran longer than I'd budgeted. A fast first draft isn't a cheap one. It just moves the work to the back end.
I'm not switching. Ulysses stays home, and most days I'll still type. But I noticed that the draft I spoke told me what I thought, and the draft I typed afterward told me how to say it. That's two jobs, and for years I've been asking one tool to do both at once.
From the Field:
Six Colors — sixcolors.com
Daring Fireball — daringfireball.net
Consumer Reports (Tech) — consumerreports.org
For deeper dives: MacSparky (paid membership) — macsparky.com
Read more at https://gardener-of-life.com
If this resonates, buy me a coffee — it keeps the field notes coming.
https://buymeacoffee.com/gardeneroflife
This post is free through December 31, 2027. Starting January 1, 2028, Gardener of Life moves to a paid membership.
