Action Performance

How to Write 10,000 Words Each Day

It's official: I got hired as a content writer. It's a full-time job, and this means that I will post less often here. My job description is very simple: I have to write 10,000 words per day, five days per week.

For many of you, the mere thought of writing 20 pages each day may be frightening. Truth be told, it was for me as well, before I discovered voice typing software. Now, I can easily write 1,000 words in about 15 minutes. This means that if I'd be able to create all the needed content in one go, I could finish the job for an entire day in only 2 1/2 hours.

I won't pretend that this is actually happening, though. I'm a regular human being, so I need to take breaks every half an hour or so. I need these breaks to relax my brain, but I also use them to research material for the next articles. Anyway, life is good! I get to work for only 4-5 hours each day, and yet I get a full-time salary. A good one! My boss doesn't care what type of tools I use, as long as the content has a good quality.

If you struggle creating content because you're a slow typist or you lack inspiration, there is no better cure than Dragon Naturally Speaking. There are lots of tutorials that show how to use it, so I won't go into details. Here's a huge collection of tutorials, for example.

Dragon tends to be quite pricey, though. You're going to need to pay $300-$500 for the application, which is a lot imho, unless you are earning your monthly paycheck by creating content, the way I'm doing it.

Fortunately, there are several decent alternatives out there, and they don't cost any money. And before you start wondering, I'm not talking about Microsoft Windows' own voice recognition system, because that tool can't be used for serious work.

However, the first free tool that I'm going to recommend comes from... Microsoft. It's one of the Microsoft Garage projects, though. Dictate has just been launched, and it is amazing! It's an add-on that works fine with Outlook, Word and PowerPoint. The engine behind it is... Cortana, what else? The truth is that Cortana does a great job recognizing various commands, but it couldn't be used for large amounts of text. That is, until now...

Dictate offers support for more than 20 languages and - prepare for an amazing feature - it is able to translate your text to one of the 60 supported languages, in real time, as you dictate it!

This means that you could speak in English and Dictate will convert the text to Italian on the fly, making it ready to be emailed to your aunt Carla, who has lived in Italy since she was a tiny little girl.

Dictate comes with manual and auto punctuation modes, a killer feature for anyone who's used dictation software for more than a few hours in his/her life, and thus understands its importance.

What about Google? Well, they have implemented a voice dictation system that works with Google docs a while ago, but it is quite cumbersome to use. A much better idea, even though the output may need some work, is to use a Google Chrome plug-in that was created to work with Gmail.

Email Dictation has got a great 4.5 rating out of a maximum of 5, and for a good reason. Simply open a Gmail message, click the microphone icon at the bottom of the screen, and then you can start dictating your message in one of the 32 supported languages.

Use this tool responsibly, knowing that the dictated text may be sent to Google. Well, Microsoft's add-in does the same thing anyway. And most of us don't care about sharing data, of course, because we live in an era when this is common practice - sadly! So, if you choose to use Email Dictation, simply copy/paste the resulting text in your favorite editor and you'll be all set.