How Authors Think about Their Writing, Dictating, and Speaking

A recent study (Gould, 1978) showed that adults, after a few hours practice, dictate one-page letters of various complexities as well as they write them. This was true for time to compose and for quality of the resulting letters as judged by outside raters. These results are contrary to the common assumption that dictating requires a long time to learn. Why then do people not dictate more often? This study tested the hypothesis that authors just learning to dictate believe their written documents to be superior to their dictated documents. To test this, adult subjects, after being trained to dictate, composed letters of various complexities, sometimes writing them and sometimes dictating them. They were required to rate a letter's quality three times: immediately after composing it, after receiving it back from the typist and proof-editing it, and two weeks later. The results confirmed the hypothesis: subjects initially rated their written letters superior to their dictated letters, but subsequently both they and others (“recipients”) rated them as equivalent.