If you take a look at my posting frequency over the last year or so, you will probably notice my rate has slowed (a lot). Usually when my rate slows, it is because I am being distracted from my writing. In previous years this would have been work or study. This year it has been a much more pleasurable reason, looking after babby.
When I find myself getting distracted, having ways to improve my focus is vital. This has traditional been through the use of notebooks to both plot and write my stories. Without access to the internet it is easier to get down to the writing, while the lack of a need to load up the notebooks means I can just get down to work, even when I only have a few minutes to spare. As well as the advantages above, using pen and paper allows me to feed my inner Luddite.
This year I find myself partaking in a personal experiment. For my birthday, my wonderful parents gave me a Remarkable 2 tablet (and before I go any further, I should make clear this is not an ad, sponsored post or review. I'm sure if you have spent even a brief amount of time online recently you will know the company seems to be doing just fine for itself on the advertising front). For those of you not aware of Remarkable, it is a tablet designed to help people focus on their work. When coupled with the additional pen, it allows you to make handwritten notes. Better yet, the tablet comes with a handwriting to typed text option. Through witchcraft and wizardry, anything handwritten on the tablet can become typed text without the need to touch a keyboard.
You can probably guess where this post is going. For the first time on the blog, this entire post has been handwritten on my new tablet. And while I have made corrections using the keyboard option after the fact, the initial drafting of the post was done without a keyboard in sight.
I am a firm believer in the idea of technology making life easier for us, not harder, and despite posts to the contrary, I am a fan of useful tech. My issue with a lot of modern tech development is it often does the exact opposite to making life easier. Email should be a great way to quickly send what would have been previously a letter, yet more and more time is spent checking and responding to messages which did not need to be sent in the first place. Having to physically write, print and post a letter must have been a significant filter to weed out some of the dross we are bombarded with today.
With my concerns in mind, my love of the old tradition of handwritten notes, tentative evidence handwriting is better for brain development than typing, but the option to combine this with technology which should be a time saver, I was keen to try out the new tablet option
When wrote my book Free City I started writing the first daft on my laptop. I quickly realised I spent more time waiting for the laptop to boot, or distracted on "research" online, so switched to good old fashioned pen and notebook. This worked well. I had the first draft done in around a month, but then I had the laborious process of typing up my notes so I could even begin to edit it. My new tablet gives me the option to skip a step in my writing process, something I am keen to explore.
No thing is perfect.
When I first got my Remarkable, I imagined I would need to provide writing samples for the device to learn what my handwriting looks like. Other than which hand I use and the language I planned to write in, I did not need to provide anything. Somehow the tablet takes my scrawl and interprets it as text.
It is not always perfect, for example I learned early on I need to leave a line blank between each line I write to avoid confusing the device, and sometimes my calligraphy is just too much, but on the whole it is pretty good (and to hammer home the point, this paragraph was translated word perfect)!
To find out how good, I have devised a little experiment. Below is a piece of flash fiction from my book A Tale in Few Words. This piece has been copied exactly as it appears in the book (so any errors are entirely intentional...).
What I plan to do is copy the text on my tablet and use the convert function. I will also type out the passage on my phone (my method of writing down ideas which come to me at inopportune moments like as I am falling asleep), as well as using my phone's dictation software (something I have tried but I am not yet sold on).
For each method I will try to write, type or talk as I would if using the device for real (no using my Sunday best handwriting or telephone voice) and there will be no editing these attempts afterwards. They will appear below as the device interpreted my commands. We can then look at the error rate and see how the tablet does against potential alternatives.
Before we start, I should probably mention how I will determine the error rate. It is not quite as simple as you might expect, and a similar issue to the one geneticists have looking for relationships between genomes.
Imagine for example the tablet inserts a new word at the second position in the text, but everything else is identical. Do you count this as one error (a new word) or is every word afterwards also wrong as they are shifted along in the word order. I suspect most people will opt for option 1, and that is the approach I will take, any insertion, deletion or spelling error of a word will count as one error (I'm not counting letter by letter, but there is no reason why you could not use that approach if you wish, and punctuation errors will only count if they are nonsensical). There are 53 words including the title in this piece, 53 words to make an error on, and I suppose infinite additional words to accidentally insert.
Before we begin the test, first the piece as it should appear:
📙The Fisherman
He cast the net out one more time. By his feet, three pitiful fish flapped against the bottom of the boat as they breathed their last.
I'll be joining you if I don't catch anything else soon.
With his last remaining strength he hauled in the net. It was not enough.📙
So with the examplar above, it is time to begin the test.
Handwritten
✍️The Fisherman
He cast the net out one more time. By his feet, three pitiful fish flapped against the bottom of the boat as they reached their last.
I'll be joining you if I don't catch anything else soon.
With is last remaining strength he hauled in the net. It was not enough.✍️
By my count that is two errors highlighted in bold.
Typed
👨💻The Fisherman
He cast the net out one more time. By his feet, three pitiful fish flapped against the boat as they breathed their last.
I'll be joining you if I don't catch anything else soon.
With his last remaining strength he hauled in the net. It was not enough.👨💻
For once the autocorrect gods have looked kindly on me and I must admit I cannot see any errors here, let me know in the comments if you can.
Dictated
🗣️The fisherman
he castanet out one more time. By his feet, three pitiful fish flaps against the boat as they breathe their last.
I'll be joining you if I don't catch anything else soon.
With his last remaining strength, he hold in the net. It was not enough.🗣️
I'm not counting missed capital letters here, but can spot at least (is castanets, while funny, one error or three?) four errors here.
Conclusions.
In reality, on this granted short piece, all three options did well, and the tablet certainly held its own against alternative tech. As I am enjoying using the tablet, and it is encouraging me to write at least something each day before I head to bed, I will keep using it for now. Who knows, perhaps my next book will be entirely handwritten without the need for a keyboard at all.
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