Recently I had an old scene replay in my head. I was in community college and one of the best English teachers I had pulled me aside while returning a paper I wrote to ask if I had used voice-to-text to write the paper. They went on to explain that the paper sounded like how someone would speak. At the time, voice-to-text was still a rather new technology and I had not used it for that paper. This had also sent me into a slight panic as if I had done something wrong – could voice-to-text be counted as cheating? But, my grade was good. And looking back I wonder if the teacher had meant it as a compliment or maybe just testing their ability to recognize voice-to-text.
In my first entry, I wrote about how I dislike the style of writing that is taught in k12, where you find a few sources and quotes and connect them together with no real voice to the writing. But even after two years of graduate school, in a program where the average student age is in their 30s, this style of writing is still prevalent. At this point I am in advance level classes, where all my fellow students have a wealth of foundational knowledge to use with the new concepts we are learning; however, in our discussion posts, often the writing will be a series of quotes from third parties and references to concepts in the reading for the week. This makes for disengaging posts, as there is no new perspective to learn from.
However, not all of my fellow students write like that. Many will take one of their own experiences and apply the concepts to that experience. Others will take a concept and try to build upon it with other concepts they have learn. This is amazing for learning, as a connection you overlooked could have been made by someone else. Or you can see how they analyzed an experience, and sometimes even see something to add to that analysis.
Today if someone asked if I wrote with voice-to-text, I would take it as a compliment to say that they could hear my voice in my writing.