Old School Versus Speech Recognition

Not long ago at Starbucks I was talking to a fellow author, he has written two novels, and they were selling quite well. He had done quite a few book shows, given speeches, and he is starting to get a following. His publisher is quite happy, and gladly published his second novel which is doing even better now. He hopes one day to be able to be a writer and do this for a living permanently, full-time. I hope for his sake he can pull this off because writing novels is a very competitive industry, and most people don’t make it. He’s off to a good start.
I asked him if he used speech recognition software and he told me he didn’t; “I am old school,” he said, but he also admitted that when it came to writing dialogue that it is much better to use speech recognition software because it sounds more fluid. I agree with him on both accounts, and not only for fictional work, but also for nonfiction. In this particular article I am using speech recognition software, but about one third of my online articles are written by typing. I do note a significant difference, not only in the complexity of my writing, but when you slow down and actually type it into a keyboard you are able to choose your words better and write at a higher level.
It would seem to me that those people that prepare newspaper articles are better off using speech recognition because they have to keep the reading level at about eighth grade, if they go over that, many of the people reading the article won’t understand it. Of course if you’re writing fine literature, and you are using speech recognition you are just asking for trouble with three times as much editing because you’re going to have to keep choosing new words as go through it in each subsequent editing cycle.
He told me when he was doing his screenplays, or trying to turn his novel into scripts that he did enjoy using speech recognition software. That also made sense to me. As the future of writing evolves, perhaps it is important for all those old-school writers to jump on board with some of these new tools when it serves their purpose, but they should do what works best for them most of the time. That’s pretty much what I got out of our conversation, and I think we both agreed even though we write in different venues that is to say nonfiction and fiction. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.