11.5

TIP You can take advantage of Dragon’s option to automatically insert commas and periods as you dictate—

see Auto-Formatting under the DragonBar’s Tools menu. The Help contains details about this “Natural

Punctuation” option and the commands to turn it on and off.

IMPORTANT: The location and behavior of the Results indicator can be customized from the Options

dialog’s View tab. Many users find it most convenient to “anchor” the indicator to a place where it’s unlikely to

hide anything, such as the bottom right corner of their screen; to do that, just check the “Anchor” checkbox,

close the Options dialog, then drag the indicator to the desired place.

Below are other frequent punctuation marks—you may want to say them out loud once before the next

exercise. Note in particular the ellipsis and the difference between dash and hyphen.

Remember that you can use the Vocabulary Editor to see punctuation and symbols with their existing spoken

forms, as well as to add your own spoken forms, and to modify properties (such as “having no following space”

like the open quote.)

“ open quote

” close quote

( open paren or open parenthesis

) close paren or close parenthesis

… ellipsis or dot dot dot

& ampersand or and sign

-- dash

- hyphen

TIP You don’t always have to say hyphens: thanks to its built-in Vocabulary, Dragon can automatically

include hyphens in items such as 3-year-old, above-mentioned, after-tax, ad-libbed, ankle-length, anti-

infective, as well as famous hyphenated names like Abdul-Jabbar. (To see many, you can choose “Words

containing punctuation” in the Vocabulary Editor’s dropdown list “Display”.)

You can prevent Dragon from entering a hyphen by pausing or saying “spacebar” where the hyphen would be.

Exercise 4: Dictate the following sample (if any recognition errors occur, ignore them for now.)

These lessons remind me that "practice makes perfect." (Who said this, Confucius?)

When it comes to speech-recognition software, truer words were never spoken…

TIP At the moment when one turns off its microphone off, Dragon may still be working on the last sounds it

heard. Be patient—remember, this is an on/off toggle, so pressing the microphone hotkey again would actually

tell Dragon to wake up.

Key points for your first dictation:

 What you dictate is transcribed at the insertion point (the blinking vertical bar), the place where

characters would appear if you started to type. (Before you dictate, make sure that the desired

window is not just visible, but also has the focus.)

 To modify how Dragon indicates that recognition is in progress, use the View tab of the Options dialog

(to bring up this dialog, you can say "open Dragon options). To avoid situations where the Results

indicator (the little Dragon icon or the stretching box) prevents you from seeing something on your