My sister and I worked our way around the country for six months in 1996, doing odd jobs like washing airplanes, weeding sweetgrass fields, cleaning B&Bs and housesitting for strangers. We’d pitch our tent behind the garbage dumpster at hotels and sneak in for the free breakfast, or we’d sleep in the car and freshen up in the bathroom of a fast-food restaurant — we called it urban camping.

At any rate, I wrote a book about the experience: "America on Five Dollars an Hour." I wrote it on an electronic portable typewriter. To save paper, I typed the whole thing in one long paragraph, single-spaced, front and back.

When I started trying to transfer the book to a computer, I was hating life. Hours and hours of retyping and reformatting. So I invested in software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, a brand new program that would type as I spoke.

What a mess. I had to train it for at least an hour, and I had to talk. like. this. very. slowly. and. clearly. My voice was growing hoarse from the strain. And, more than anything else, I repeated, "Correct that. Correct that. Delete that. Correct that." It never worked.

Last spring I decided to give Naturally Speaking another try. What a difference a decade has made! I can easily dictate in a natural voice with a natural speaking pattern, and it’s probably 95 percent accurate. I had to train it for maybe 15 minutes this time, instead of an hour or more. And it scanned my computer for all my files to pick up my writing patterns and subject matter.

That being said, I don’t think a freelance copywriter can really use it for regular writing where you need to sit down and come up with copy (or at least I’m not talented enough to do so). But it is excellent for the following:

• Entering names in a database for a mailing — it rocks for addresses and phone numbers especially, and you’d be surprised how often it gets names right.
• Dictating really easy writing, like some SEO articles I did a month or so ago.
• Writing a list of tasks/ideas.

In other words, it’s good for a chug-chug along writing task, where the words will flow and you really just need to get them down on paper.

Another tip — You HAVE to buy a good microphone for this thing to work well. I have a headset that I use with a very nice mouthpiece. Works like a charm.

Oh, and the book? I found a publisher, rewrote it three times in two years and bailed out two weeks before printing. The manuscript just wasn’t good any more.