An essential factor in interacting with C-MOC as a medium is automaticity. Automaticity refers to "the ability to perform complex skills with minimal attention and conscious effort" (Flor and Samuels 1). Drawing from William James' discussion of habit in Principles of Psychology, Richard Flor and Jay Samuels explain that the essence of automaticity is that "with practice, improvements take place that allow one to move beyond control of basic tasks" (1). Achieving a certain level of automaticity fairly quickly is essential to developing proficiency in computer-mediated oral composing. Each of the three informants was given lists of commands to use while composing with DNS. The commands refer to are ones related to punctuation, navigating the text, and revision. For example, punctuation commands include: "colon," "period," and "comma." Revision and editing commands include "scratch that" and "delete that." Navigation commands include "go to end of line," "go to beginning of paragraph," and "go to end of document."
In this audio clip (taken from the session in which she composed her letter), Chandra shows an increase in automaticity when she goes back to repunctuate her sentence using verbal commands.
Transcription: "this reading comes from the novel Beloved scratch that . . . this reading comes from the novel comma cap Beloved . . . period"