Dragons and Funny Interpretations

by Betsy Ashton

Betsy Ashton, born in Washington, DC, was raised in Southern California where she ran wild with coyotes in the hills above Malibu. She protested the war in Vietnam, burned her bra for feminism, and is a steadfast Independent. She is a writer, a thinker, the mother of three grown stepchildren, companion and friend. She mentors writers and writes and publishes fiction. Her first mystery, Mad Max Unintended Consequences, was published in February 2013. The second in the series, Uncharted Territory, A Mad Max Mystery, came out in April 2015. In her spare time, she is the president of the state-wide Virginia Writers Club. She loves riding behind her husband on his motorcycle. You’ll have to decide for yourself if and where she has a tattoo.

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May 29, 2017

You all know I’m going through rehab to strengthen the wrist I broke on April 25. It’s getting better. I have enough rotation to type. Alas, rehab isn’t fixing the typos I make. And I can’t play the piano.

Right after I had my spill, I bought Natural Dragon software so that I could keep working. My friends warned me that the software has to learn your voice, your cadence, and special words you use. They were right.

After going through the set up exercises for Dragon to learn my cadence, it was time to try it on a manuscript I was editing. Because the writer I’m working with has a penchant for putting commas in the wrong places or leaving them out entirely, I trained my left hand to drag the mouse to the spot where a comma needed to be inserted. I said, “comma.” A comma appeared. About the fifteenth time I said, “comma,” my husband asked if I was working on a friend’s manuscript. He’s heard me worry commas into the text more often than not.

Well, I got fat and sassy, so I thought I’d take a crack at one of my works. I was pretty good with most of the edits, but the software kept inserting Sad Sack for Mad Max. These words don’t sound anything alike. I really couldn’t figure out why Sad Sack sounded like Mad Max. I still don’t get it.

Worse was when I started working on a new manuscript. There is no way the software learned the name of the main character. I admit Sa-Li Ma is an unusual name. He’s Chinese, so it’s not unusual for him. Dragon couldn’t, just couldn’t, figure it out. Sa-Li came out Solly, Sally, Sully, Salim, silently, and several other silly mistakes. It’s pronounced Sah-Lee. Now hard it that, especially after I put it in the Dragon dictionary.

I figured Ma wouldn’t be all that hard. It means “horse” in Chinese. It’s pronounced Mah. I had everything from Ma to Mott to Meh to Mole. Mole??? Really???

I whined to a girlfriend who advised I change the character’s name. I did. Surely Dragon should be able to understand John Doe. Leave it to say, Doe came out in a variety of different spellings. Oh, well, I can use search and replace for John and manually change Doe to Ma.

The software picks up all sorts of speech. I turned to say something to my husband when he passed my desk. Damned software picked up every word with no errors. But a name, no way. You can’t imagine what it did with a sneeze.

I’m not going to quit on the software. I’m also not going to try writing any dialog in dialect. Not gonna do it. Uh uh. And I think I’ll not cough.

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Betsy Ashton is the author of Mad Max Unintended Consequences and Uncharted Territory, A Mad Max Mystery. She has a new short story, “Midnight in the Church of the Holy Grape,” in 50 Shades of Cabernet. Her works have appeared in several anthologies and on NPR.