More of this amazing work http://bit.ly/5Me43I

My friend Stuart Silverstone just sent me a link to a page of amazing photographs, like the one you see here. The artist paints himself to match the background, and thus when photographed appropriately, literally “fades into the background.”

Camouflage: it’s an important lesson. Sometimes you want to hide things in plain sight. Other times, you want them to stand out. The wonderful thing about writing is that it enables you to do both.

Are you making an important point to your reader? Then don’t let it blend with the colors of the background. Use your words to say, “this is something important, something to which you should pay attention.” Make your point into a heading. Define it. Talk about why it is important.

Perhaps you are writing to a reader who is in a stressful situation. You want to acknowledge the situation, but you don’t want to dwell on it. That situation is not your topic: it is the backdrop for your message. “Since September 11, 2001, teachers in New York City have had to deal with the effects of the events of that day on their students. Here is a list of best practices developed by a group of teachers…”

Foreground; background; it’s your choice. Don’t let your messafe gets lost in the background accidentally, and don’t allow the background to take over your prose when that is not your intention.

Dictation software has improved to the point where it is actually practical for writing. The challenge, of course, is that when we talk, we don’t necessarily structure our utterances according to plan.

Speak your book!

The methodology I teach for book writing — Joel’s BookProgram™ — has as its central meme, “structure before content.” If you create your structure, you can then easily dictate the segments at the lowest level of the structure. In the case of a book, this would probably be subchapters — portions that are 200 to 600 words in length.

Why use dictation software? For many, speaking is easier than writing. Most people can speak much faster than they can type.

I have found another, more subtle, reason for dictating rather than writing: speaking seems to come from a different place in my brain. As a result, what I dictate often has more emotion than what I write, even more authenticity.

Why not use dictation software? For one thing, even though speech recognition has improved dramatically in recent years, the software still introduces weird errors, due to imperfect recognition. That is actually not a significant disadvantage, since most writing needs a round of editing anyway.

There’s the cost of a package that includes software and a high-quality microphone. Current prices are around $200, for the leading PC and Mac software.

There is also a learning curve, both in terms of getting used to dictating instead of typing, and in terms of using your voice to control your computer and perform editing functions during the dictation process.

Can dictation take the place of transcription? Yes and no. Transcribers can handle noisy input, and multiple speakers in the same recording; dictation software cannot.

The most popular packages by far on the market today are Dragon Dictate for the PC, and MacSpeech Dictate for the Mac (also built on Dragon technology). Both are about  $200, and come with a good quality microphone. Incidentally, the quality of the microphone is critical; don’t try to save money by buying a cheap mike.

In short, dictation can:

• Save you time
• Make your writing sound more authentic
• Require you to learn a new workflow

Dictation may not work for everyone, but for most book authors, it’s worth a shot.