Five winning stories will be selected by a panel of judges, and the winning entrants will each receive an Amazon Kindle 2 as well as Dragon NaturallySpeaking upgrades for three years.
I am an older graduate student who left computer programming to get my doctorate in philosophy. I credit my having Dragon Naturally Speaking for allowing me to pass my qualification exams with what my school, the University of Texas at Dallas, calls “High Pass,” which is the highest rank available and rarely given. The reason I credit Dragon Preferred Naturally Speaking with making this possible is the short time frame I was allowed to gather my material. Instead of waiting until the next semester, as most doctoral candidates do, I chose to apply for my qualification exams as soon as I completed my course work. That gave me a mere two weeks to prepare for my written qualification exams.
Here are the rules. The candidate supplies two possible questions in each of three areas of his or her competence. The areas are historical, a specialty, and a topic of choice. This means that I had to prepare to write a ten to twenty page paper on each of six topics. The examiners would choose from these only three questions, but the candidate has to be ready in all six. These answers cannot be written in advance because the final form of the question is decided by the committee. The candidate will receive the questions one at a time and have 24 hours to answer it. The candidate rests for 24 hours and then receives the next question. All three must be finished in the same week.
Here is how Dragon Preferred Naturally Speaking came in. I had two weeks to prepare enough background information to write 10 to 20 pages on six topics. The way I managed to accomplish this task in the short time available was to prepare as many relevant quotations and analyses as possible on each of the six topics. I saved these in six separate subdirectories.
It is far less tiring, and certainly much faster, to dictate with Dragon Preferred Naturally Speaking than it is to type, so I was able to prepare my material more efficiently than I could have manually. The amazing thing to me is that I can dictate text directly from Heidegger, or Thomas Mann, or Dostoevsky, or Nietzsche into Dragon Preferred with a high degree of accuracy.
Because of the solid preparation that Dragon Preferred Naturally Speaking allowed me to accumulate, I was able to handle each question in the time allowed as well as get a good night’s sleep after each. I was almost as fresh on the last question as on the first one. Thanks to Dragon Preferred Naturally Speaking I had more than sufficient material already entered to choose from in my final essay. All I had to do was organize it, fill in the transitions, and finesse the introductions and conclusions.
I could not have done this at the highest level without help saving the text without Dragon Preferred Naturally Speaking.