I am going to try to do a lot of dictation this year, because my word goals are extremely ambitious, so I thought I’d link to a few books I’ve found helpful. One caveat: everyone’s hardware and software needs are different, so don’t take anything any of these books say as gospel in terms of exactly what you need to buy to make it happen. Everyone recommends Dragon Naturally Speaking, for instance, but I have so far stuck to just the existing speech-to-text option in Windows 10.

Dictate Your Book, by Monica Leonelle: This one offers a lot of good, basic advice on the nature and process of dictation. One of the more interesting exercises has you practice with public domain texts, like excerpts from Alice in Wonderland, to get more comfortable with the punctuation commands for your software of choice.

On Being a Dictator, by Kevin J. Anderson and Martin L. Shoemaker: Anderson goes hiking and talks out his books as he walks, while Shoemaker dictates into a microphone in his car on his daily commute to work. Between them, they offer a lot of insight into figuring out how to work dictation into your daily routine, and what kind of equipment and software (or human transcription services) you might need, without insisting that you need to buy exactly what they use or do exactly what they do.

Fool-Proof Dictation by Christopher Downing: The best book I’ve found on the process of training yourself to tell your stories out loud. Some of the training exercises are a little out there, but you can stick to the ones that work for you if you prefer.