How do you dictate a letter?

Dictate a letter by deciding three things before you speak, then saying each paragraph as a few steady phrases. Write down who will read the letter, what you are asking for or telling them, and the date you need an answer. Dictate the greeting, the purpose, the detail and the close as separate blocks, and check names, dates and figures in a read-through before the letter goes out. Most of the effort goes into planning, not speaking.

The method is the same for a short note to a colleague and for a formal letter to a client. The planning is what changes. A formal letter has more fixed parts, and each part needs its exact words checked. The steps below apply to both, and the exceptions come at the end.

Plan the letter before you speak

Planning takes most of the time in letter writing, whatever method you use. In IBM's 1978 study of business letters, about two-thirds of composing time went to planning, whether the letter was written, dictated or spoken ¹. Dictation does not remove that work. It changes when you do it, because the sentence has to be ready before you say it.

Write three decisions on paper. The first is the reader, since the reader sets the tone and the level of detail. The second is the purpose, stated as one request or one piece of news. The third is the deadline or the answer you need. A letter built on those three points rarely needs rewriting, because each paragraph has a job.

Dictate the letter in four blocks

Speak the letter in blocks, and pause between them. The pauses give the software clean sentence boundaries, and your paragraph breaks come from the pauses.

1. Greeting. Say "Dear Ms. Lopez," and pause.
2. Purpose. State the request in one phrase: "I am writing to ask whether we can move the review meeting to Thursday, the twenty-third."
3. Detail. Give the one or two facts that support the request, each in a phrase of similar length.
4. Close. Say the thank-you and the sign-off, then pause before your name.

Keep each block to one thought. A block with three ideas is where most restarts happen, and a restart halfway through a sentence leaves the abandoned start in the text unless you catch it later. If a block runs long, split it at the next natural pause and start a new phrase.

Speak at your normal conversational pace. Speed is not the goal. Research on conversational telephone speech finds that speaking rate rises as a turn grows from one word to seven words ². Those are conversation turns, not dictated letters, so use the finding only as a rough guide to phrase length.

Use the speed of dictation with care

Speech is faster than typing for the words themselves. In a controlled study on an iPhone, English entered by speech reached 153 words per minute, against 52 on the built-in keyboard ³. That study had people transcribe given short messages, so it does not time the planning. For a letter, the speed you gain is in the writing down, not in deciding what to say.

Experience also changes the result. In IBM's 1978 study, novice dictators learned within a few hours to dictate letters as quickly and as well as they wrote them, although they did not think they were doing that well ⁴. Experienced dictators composed letters between 0 and 25 percent faster than novices, depending on how complex the letter was ⁵. The gap is modest, which is useful to know: practice helps, but the planning step still sets the pace.

Check names, dates and the close in a read-back

Read the whole letter once before you send it. The errors that matter most in a dictated letter are the ones a reader notices first: a misheard name, a wrong date, a figure with a dropped digit, or a missing "not". Check those four things first, then read the punctuation the software added, because a comma in the wrong place can change a sentence.

Dictated text can contain errors that a quick read misses. In a 2016 study of dictated clinical notes, the first speech recognition draft had an error rate of 7.4 errors per 100 words ⁶. Those notes used medical vocabulary, so your letter may have fewer errors. The lesson holds anyway: the draft is not the final text.

If the letter must be exact, such as a notice with a deadline or a figure in a contract, check each number against its source before sending. Use spoken punctuation for marks that matter, such as a bracket or a percent sign. The full list of spoken marks for your platform is in our guide to dictation punctuation.

Letters have worked this way for a long time

Dictating letters is not new. For most of the twentieth century, business people recorded their letters, and a secretary typed them from the recordings ⁷. The modern version removes the secretary, so you check the typed result yourself. That is why the read-back is now part of the job.

Early research on dictating letters asked whether speech could replace handwriting. In 1983, researchers reported that some versions of an imperfect listening typewriter could be at least as good as handwriting and dictating for composing letters, even on first use ⁸. The same authors said that speech recognition was not yet advanced enough for a reliable listening typewriter ⁹. Their finding was about how people compose, and that lesson still applies to your draft.

When the method changes

The steps above fit most letters. Three cases call for something different:

• A letter in a language or with heavy technical terms. Dictate the sentences you can say cleanly, and spell names and terms with the spelling command your tool offers. Check the spelling of each one in the read-back.
• A letter with fixed legal or formal wording. Dictate it as a draft, then compare it against the template or clause word by word. Do not rely on the software's punctuation for clauses where a comma changes the meaning.
• A letter you are unsure about. Type the opening and closing sentences yourself, and dictate the middle. Many people find this easier while they learn, and it keeps the most visible parts under their control.

For the wider rhythm of dictated writing, read the guide on how to dictate. If you are not yet comfortable speaking a draft aloud, the notes on getting used to dictation explain the early stages. For notes and quick messages instead of letters, see how to dictate notes quickly. Terms used here, such as spoken punctuation and automatic punctuation, are defined in the glossary.