How do you dictate a blog post?

Dictate a blog post in three passes: outline the headings, speak the draft in short sections, then edit at a keyboard. Each pass does one job. Speaking is the quickest way to get words down, but it is a poor place to polish sentences, so keep the polishing for later.

Outline the post first so each dictated section has a job

Write the headings and one line of point under each before you speak a word. In Kellogg's 1988 experiments, preparing a written outline before writing led to higher-quality documents than not outlining, as rated by judges ¹. Those were short laboratory documents, not blog posts, but the step costs little. The outline does not need to be detailed. A heading, the point you want to make, and the example or source you will use is enough to start a section.

Speak each section in short runs, one idea at a time

Speech is far faster than typing. In a controlled study on an iPhone, English text entered by speech reached 153 words per minute, against 52 on the built-in keyboard ². At those rates, a 1,000-word draft takes about 6.5 minutes to say, against about 19.2 minutes to type, a saving of about 12.7 minutes before any editing ³.

Those numbers describe short messages read aloud in a quiet room, on an older recognizer, so a blog post will not match them exactly. Speak in short runs, one idea per run. Apple's guide for macOS Catalina 10.15 advised speaking for no more than 40 seconds at a time ⁴. In macOS 27, Mac Dictation accepts text of any length without a timeout, and you stop it with the Escape key, the Microphone key (if your keyboard has one) or the Dictation shortcut ⁵. Short runs still help, because a short passage is easier to correct without losing the sentence before it.

Do not edit while you speak

Keep the drafting and the editing apart. Kellogg's 2001 experiments found that planning, translating ideas into sentences and reviewing compete for one common, general-purpose working memory resource ⁶. That study measured writing, not dictation, but it suggests that stopping to fix a comma while you dictate may take capacity from the sentence you are still forming. When something needs checking, say a marker such as "check this" or "insert link", and move on. Search for the markers at the desk.

Learn the navigation commands before you need them

The largest productivity gains in a longitudinal dictation study came from better dictation quality and from using navigation commands ⁷. The commands for moving, selecting and correcting are the ones to learn first, because they are what you reach for when a sentence goes wrong. Our dictation commands guide lists them, and the automatic punctuation entry explains what your app may add without being asked.

On Windows, you start voice typing with the Windows key and H pressed together on a hardware keyboard ⁸. Our how to dictate on Windows page covers the setup in more detail.

Edit at a keyboard in a separate pass

Once the draft is down, read it aloud once. Where you stumble, the sentence is often too long, so split it. Then work through a short checklist:

1. Remove filler words such as "um" and "uh", which spoken drafts often collect.
2. Check every name, number, date and quotation against your notes or the recording.
3. Add the links, images and headings the post needs, which are easier to place by typing.
4. Fix technical terms that the recognizer heard wrongly. If a word keeps coming out wrong, add it to your dictation tool's word list where one exists, as described in how to add custom words to Mac dictation.

The checklist matters because a dictation engine can make errors that look correct. A sentence that reads smoothly can still say something you did not mean, so check the claims against your sources, not just the wording.

Where dictation fits and where it does not

Dictation works best for the prose: the introduction, the explanations, the story. It is less suited to work with dense structure. Code, tables, long citation lists and heavy formatting are faster to type, so draft the prose by voice and type those parts. A post with many numbers needs a more careful check than one without, because a single misheard digit changes the claim.

For the wider method, see how dictation works for other writing, the guide to writing a book by dictation, and the dictation for journalists and content creators guide, which covers checking and privacy for source material. For sizing a video script from the same kind of speech, see how many words is a 10-minute video script.