Chandra provided the most detailed oral commentary on her own process of working with C-MOC. Her feedback during the sessions showed that she consciously considered the medium as she composed. During the practice free-write exercise, she encountered accuracy problems because of her speaking style. Rather than sound as though she was dictating pre-planned text, she worked in a more enthusiastic, conversational mode, and her voice became softer.
For her freewrite, Chandra began summarizing the contents of a favorite book, The Giver. However, her difficulties with accuracy led her to delete this text and begin composing on an entirely different topic. She stopped to correct mistakes by voice as they happened, often resorting to typing over them. As I watched her compose this free-write, I noticed that at certain points, while discussing The Ring, she used body language similar to that which she might have used in conversation with another person. Her voice grew softer, and she used a conversational tone as if she were describing the movie to a friend. This switch to a conversational mode is one example of the program’s ability to change a writer’s train of thought and intention in composing. At one point she described her difficulty in staying out of a conversational mode, suggesting that comparisons should be made between two people conversing and one person using C-MOC:
CHANDRA: Because . . . you should study, somebody should integrate a study with this and, like, communication. You know, how it affects communication. Because you can’t—Even though it’s not it’s not a person, even though you’re physically not having a conversation, it’s like you are.
In the first clip, Chandra exemplifies one of the problems with oral composing with VRT--she becomes very expressive in explaining the climax of The Ring, her voice becomes extremely soft (seemingly for dramatic effect), and she has to repeat the phrase.
Transcription: "when the girl climbs out of the television it frightens the guy the guy comma . . . it frightens the guy so much . . . that he dies . . . that he dies . . . dies. . ."
In the second clip, Chandra discusses the problem of talking informally and not being able to "speak" the kind of text she would create if she wrote silently by hand.
Transcription: "Because I think that with me like trying to talk about I started to slur and I was like lets start over, and so for me it’s just like . . . if I’m talking then I deal with a lot of . . . I say a lot of words that I don’t want on paper . . . and instead of it . . . the reason it can’t say oh this isn’t good for this sentence, it’ll just put anything on there . . . And so I’ll be like “Ok, so this and that . . . " and I don’t want to tell it that I want it to be like “There was a story about" . . . you know I want to be eloquent and it’s hard to do . . . and it’s hard to do just talking. . ."