Soaring Through High School

Essay writing can be a daunting mental exercise for any high school student, but for Matthew Talley, his cerebral palsy made it a physical challenge as well. He typically had to take his assignments home to complete because typing put too much stress on his muscles.

"My normal essay was less than a page, and it took me up to two weeks to make it read the way I wanted," he recalls. "I would be thinking about what to say, and then by the time I was able to put it on paper, it was wrong, or there were tons of spelling mistakes."

But that was before he installed MacSpeech Dictate onto his MacBook Pro and began training the software for his voice. Talley quickly found himself liberated: MacSpeech Dictate helped him forget about his physical disability and allowed him to focus on what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it.

He remembers that moment vividly: "I started using MacSpeech Dictate, and the next thing I knew, I had four pages done." Two weeks of laborious typing to produce less than a page? Not any more; now he breezes through that in an hour, allowing him to soar into the territory of multi-page efforts. He can develop each thesis in more depth and set down on the page exactly what he wants.

Alison McKenna, Talley's English Literature teacher at Juneau-Douglas in Alaska, adds: "MacSpeech Dictate has been extremely beneficial for Matthew in terms of confidence, fluency, timeliness of completion, and overall quality of work. We talk a lot about how your ear can detect missed words, redundancies, and other errors. Dictating one's writing is beneficial on many levels."

Just Another High School Student

Talley uses MacSpeech Dictate with various Mac applications, including Microsoft Word for English papers and other written assignments and Firefox for web browsing and sending and receiving email with Gmail., Those tools enable him to not only conduct research for his English Literature and History assignments but also keep up with a typical teenager's busy social life. He brings his MacBook Pro to school so he can take advantage of MacSpeech Dictate in other classes too. For example, if he needs to fill out a form, he simply pulls out his laptop.

"When I have to use MacSpeech Dictate, I go somewhere quiet, like the hallway," Talley says. "People will see me and ask 'What are you doing? Are you talking to your computer?' And I'll say, 'Yeah, I am,' and I'll show it to them."

McKenna notes: "Other students observe the convenience and efficacy of this software and covet it."

Or as Talley puts it: "A kid in my Lit. class saw MacSpeech Dictate and said 'Wow, I want one of those!' I feel gifted to use MacSpeech Dictate at school."

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