10 Fine Reasons You Should Dictate Posts Instead of Writing

Sometimes, systems fail us. 

Then it gets evident that there needs to be a different way of doing things. 

And I’ve realized this with how we create content. 

We type articles. We have been taught to increase our typing speeds to be more productive in writing. 

And typing is not an exciting experience for most people, let alone learning to tap keys with our fingers faster.

Yet, we’ve had the tools to create content faster all this time than we can ever imagine with typing. 

This realization came to my mind earlier this year, and it’s one of the foundational pillars of this blog.

Writing through dictation. 

If you have a few minutes to spare, follow me through these ten reasons why you need to stop typing and instead dictate posts for your blog.

Why you dictate posts instead of writing

1. Less Time, More Content. 

The average typing speed is about 25 words per minute. On the other hand, people can speak between 125 words to 150 words in one minute, unless you’re Busta Rhymes.

Notice this considerable difference. Imagine how much more work you can produce if you harness this ability?

It will take one hour to write a 1,500-word article if you’re typing. On the other hand, it would take just about 10 minutes to speak that entire article. 

Why have people not realized this power that comes with dictation? 

Take two writers who are paid five cents per word. One of them does his writing through typing, and the other does his through dictation. 

In one hour, the typist produces work worth $30 worth of content compared to the dictation writer who will produce $90 worth of writing. One can easily earn three times as much just through dictation.

With more productivity comes more output and the potential to make more money. Who doesn’t want to make money faster without breaking a sweat? 

2. You Have Just One Take. 

When you’re dictating, you only have one take to go through the entire piece.

This is unlike writing, where you can edit parts of your essay as you continue to write. 

You cannot delete audios repeatedly to make them perfect before you can transcribe for blog conversion.

You are forced to spit content. And this requires that you do research and study to know what you’ll talk about. 

Tight and well-defined outlines that show the entire article in one view is an absolute necessity. 

It must describe the subtopics you’ll talk about and differentiate them not to repeat yourself. You don’t want to be redundant. 

So, through dictation, you practice being more transparent and economical with your words to give every point enough real estate on your article.

3. You Avoid Second Guessing Yourself. 

During the typical writing process, writers are their worst critics.

They constantly second guess themselves, re-read parts of the articles to ensure that they are perfect and ensure that they have covered every single idea in their head. 

And this leads to an editing cycle that breaks your focus on your workflow. 

When you pick up from where you left, your mind is jumbled up with ideas, and your flow is unclear. 

Also, the crippling perfectionism that eats most writers, you agonize over the quality of articles you write, affecting your productivity and motivation.

You spend so much time on one article making it perfect; a piece that would have typically required a couple of hours to get done takes days to finish. 

Dictation, as discussed earlier, forces you to get all your ideas out from start to finish leaving no room for self-doubt and perfectionism because you know at the end you’ll get time to refine your article.

4. You Avoid the Editing Cycle. 

This is closely tied with the previous point and is based on writers’ habit of criticizing and second-guessing themselves. 

When re-reading your articles, new ideas pop up. You edit out some parts, add juice in other sections. 

You discover an exciting idea and delve into it. You work on some points and neglect others.

Now, that’s an editing cycle that puts you in the perfectionism loop. It distracts you from the actual content writing process. It jumbles up your mind and prevents you from having a good flow of your work.

You end up with a fragmented piece with some highly developed parts and others not so well developed. 

Your work turns out imperfect, the exact opposite of what you wanted and the clock didn’t stop ticking.

With dictation, one take is all you need to get it done with. It will not be perfect earlier on, but with practice, you get closer to greatness.

5. Push Yourself to Become Clear. 

When writing, you type the fuzzy ideas in your mind adding a lot of fluff in the process. 

These ideas are not refined, but you can easily edit them out on the spot. 

You only need to click the backspace button. It is easy and instantly gratifying.

With dictation, you have no time to do this. 

Editing would mean redoing audios from start to finish until you feel it’s clean enough to soothe your ego. But you have not time to retake recordings. It’s not a film set. 

Since you know you need to take one recording, you must develop your ideas in your mind, make them clear and concise before you start talking or dictating your work. 

There will be no time to second-guess yourself. Neither will there be a chance to mumble and edit yourself. 

You just have to become clearer.

6. You focus on the actual task of writing. 

Analysis paralysis makes you play a mental game to appear that you’re busy doing something while avoiding the task you’re supposed to do.

When writing, you indulge in too much research, trying to gather as much information as possible and can come up with the most informative article. 

This happens to me a lot. Sometimes I study over ten articles before finding time to write my own. One article eats up two precious days.

During this research, you’ll frequently get distracted by other slightly related ideas and wander into content that serves no purpose for your goal.

This takes most of the time from your writing, where you ought to put enough time and effort in.

With the dictation, you’re forced to acquire the knowledge necessary for your ‘presentation’. You know you must dictate something you truly comprehend, so you work on making your speech clear.

Once you’re done with the dictation, you can then edit the transcription and include additional information if necessary.

7. More time to research and write high-quality content. 

You’ll know how many words you can produce with a certain length of the speech through practice. Which means you can dedicate more time to do the research. 

Now, for instance, you have 2 hours to write a 2,000-word article. You know you need 30 minutes to edit and 15 minutes to dictate that article. 

This means that you can dedicate 1.25 hours to research and gather information from trusted sources which you can refer to in your article. 

With time-bound and objective research, you can produce high-quality content, which can easily attract backlinks and build your site’s domain authority with less work and time. 

Talk about becoming a content machine. It takes time and practice, but once you get there, you’re practically limitless.

8. You become an expert on your stuff. 

Back in school, the debate club was the most active in school, and I had this friend who was a member. 

He always wanted to outshine others. This kid would own the stage and passionately argue better than politicians in parliament. 

I always wondered how he did that, until one time while preparing for exams; I went to ask him a question only to realize he was studying some magazine on gender parity. 

He told me he had a debate a day after exams, and it was critical he wins this. 

More critical than exams?

Dictation is like a conversation with an audience or a one-sided debate. It would be best if you mastered what you’re talking about before you start dictating. Your ideas flow like a river down the valley.

You can only achieve this by researching and studying well. But what puts you miles ahead is speaking about it. It follows the principles of learning through teaching. 

Dictation makes you want to master your craft. You can become an expert in your field much faster than you would if you only wrote. 

9. You become a better speaker. 

The apparent result of doing regular dictations is you become a better conversationalist. 

Dictation forces you to speak both audibly, clearly, because you know that your audio must be transcribed for you to transform it into a blog article. 

Whether it’s by a machine transcription software or a human transcriptionist, you ought to pronounce your words well so that the right words can be transcribed.

You also speak with the right tone and emphasis because besides spitting great content, you want to sell your concept well, and this is done through engaging speech and non-verbal cues which can be picked from your voice.

10. You can repurpose your content.

Besides a blog post, you can convert your dictation into many other content types and post them on different platforms to reach new audiences.

For instance, a can record a video while dictating and can publish it on YouTube. Here you’ll tap into the growing market of video consumers who’ve made Youtube the second most visited website in the world. 

Your video can attract people from YouTube to your website.

You can convert your audio into a podcast too. Lately, research shows that people engage more with podcast content than they read articles. You can also tap into this market and drive in new readers. 

How about converting audios into infographics, the most effective content type in attracting backlinks. These backlinks will improve your domain authority, setting you up for high rankings in SERPs.

Wrapping it up. 

These reasons why you should dictate posts instead of writing should encourage you to improve your productivity in content writing. 

Speech has been there for a very long time, and even the brightest minds had their speeches transcribed to create their most renowned literary works—the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Shakespeare. 

It’s high time to explore new creative ways of producing content if you want to be more productive and improve your chances of success in blogging which has become quite competitive.