When I decided to write my first how-to manual, I was employed
full-time; I had a wife, and a pre-teen daughter who was in
every sport and activity imaginable, and I was delivering
seminars and training courses at night and on Saturdays. I had
no idea when or how I was ever going to get a how-to manual
written!
Then one of my mentors suggested that I carry a cassette
recorder in my car and dictate the entire first draft while
commuting to my (last) job. And that’s exactly what I did.
When I finished dictating the first draft, I gave the tapes to a
transcription service and they created an Microsoft Word
document from the tapes, which I then edited, published, and
marketed and promoted like crazy. And the rest, as they say, is
history. As was the job I had been commuting to while I was
creating my first how-to manual.
Nowadays, voice recognition software (like Dragon Naturally
Speaking, for example) is getting good enough that you could
dictate the whole manual, either directly to your computer, or
into a digital recorder that could then be plugged into your
computer to allow you to download the digital files into the
computer to be interpreted by the voice recognition software.
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