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Hahahahahaha...when you said you thought you sounded like JFK, and I suspect from reading some of your posts in the past, that you are old enough to remember Vaughn Meader, the guy who had a hit comedy record doing voice impressions of the Kennedys in the White House...:). It made me laugh to think of it.

I thought my voice would be better, but I think with a little more experience, it will be better. I need to pitch it correctly...to me, it is a bit too nasally.

The other three major problems I observe in my own dictation (now that I have listened to it all the way through from end to end) is that I am speaking too loud, there is no dynamic range to my voice, and I can hear physical interactions where I touch the table or keyboard.

In my next book (which may be about John Hancock) I plan to fix these three problems:

The first two issues, the loudness and the lack of dynamic range are, I think connected. And I think they are both due to the fact I had my microphone a between one and two feet away from my mouth. If I get the microphone up to an inch or two away from my mouth (and put a foam baffle over it) I think it will greatly improve the quality of the reading. (I think because if I get it close to my mouth, I can turn the microphone gain WAY down, which should increase the quality of the recording. (I think-I am not educated in this nor an authority on these things, but I feel pretty confident those things are involved)

Secondly, I have to get a boom stand for my microphone. This will not only get rid of the annoying booming sound when I touched the keyboard or table, but will also let me get the microphone close to my mouth.

On the positive side, I really enjoyed constructing the phrasing and enunciating the words. I can say it was a surprise to me how much I had to concentrate in order to enunciate words correctly. I would tend to slur or even lisp over parts of words if I didn’t concentrate on it.

Worst of all, and most frustrating, is that the phraseology and vocabulary is a bit archaic. Archaic enough that some things just didn’t fit my accustomed patterns of speech, and as a result, I would trip over something or stutter. But I got better at it.

I plan to do more of this kind of thing, and I want to get better. I am an avid consumer of audiobooks, I have somewhere between 500 and 1000, and began listening because around the age of 50, my already terrible eyesight became worse to the point I can barely read a book. After just a few minutes of reading, my eyes begin to water and burn, and I cannot concentrate. I have had eye exams, spent thousands of dollars on eyeglasses, used eyedrops, but...I simply don’t read as much. I used to read constantly.

Anyway, I began listening to audiobooks, and I have heard enough of them to give me the conceit that I can tell in an instant if a reader is good or bad. I think I know what a good reading sounds like...I just can’t deliver it fully just yet.

I did find something that seemed odd to me, though-I have always felt reading (especially reading aloud) was the gold standard for implanting information inside the head. I am sure it is for me, and I know others that I think it is true for as well. Perhaps not universal. So, I was excited to read this book aloud, thinking I would retain it better and have it at my fingertips more readily.

I was humorously discouraged to find out, after reading the book aloud over the course of a year, that I retained very little from it. I have concluded I don’t have a good multitasking brain-I was so caught up in the technical aspect of enunciating, reading, and recording, that I wholly neglected to absorb any of it! I was quite surprised by that as well.