The reason you are seeing Em dashes (—) in this document is because I went in manually, after dictating the text for this review, to put them in. Voice Xpress does not seem to know about Em and En dashes. I went to Voice Xpress's menu and looked under Vocabulary Tools to see if I could create a command for Em dash, but the program would not let me enter "ctrl-alt-minus sign (on the numeric keypad)"—Microsoft Word's keystroke combination that produces an Em dash.
So I typed in "emdash," to see if it would then let me type in the keystroke combination (ctrl-alt-minus sign) to represent Em dash. Selecting the "Add" option did not, so I tried the "Train" option instead. This opened a window showing me the word "emdash" and asking me to say it twice.
Since this was not what I wanted, I hit the cancel button, but nothing happened—the screen was frozen.
After some frantic clicking on the microphone button (it had turned on because of the ctrl-alt part of the ctrl-alt-minus sign combination I had tried to enter), the Voice Xpress tools menu finally disappeared and I was back in my document—seemingly back to normal.
But not quite. The Voice Xpress menu bar showed the microphone as on and listening, but it had stopped picking up any sound at all, and the Voice Xpress menu bar itself was frozen.
There was nothing else for it. Ctrl-alt-del to get to Task Manager in NT 4.0, which showed Voice Xpress as not responding. So I had to shut it down using the End Task option in Task Manager, losing the training I had done thus far.
Then I had to save my document and shut down Word, because there is no option to fire up Voice Xpress on its own—it only comes up after you start Word (or XpressPad). So I restarted Microsoft Word, which brought Voice Xpress back with it, and determined to leave the Em dash problem well alone.
But . . . uh, oh . . . when I restarted, Voice Xpress ask me to select a speaker profile, which means "Who's talking?" My name was the only name in the list of speaker profiles, since I was the only person who had used the program and set up a profile, and I had (in a previous session) selected the option to automatically load my speaker profile every time the program started. So I should not be seeing this "select a speaker" option now.
But it gets worse. I selected the only speaker profile available (my own) and clicked "Finish," which confusingly means "OK" rather than "End the session." Up popped a small window titled "Speaker Selection" containing a big white X in a fire-engine red circle, which I took to mean "You're screwed," and I was right. The message actually read: "An error occurred when selecting the speaker," and gave me the helpful option of clicking "OK," though "Finish" or "Abort!" would have been more appropriate here.
OK, now what? I've gone to all the trouble of training the system to my speaker profile, including the hour-long training session L&H call "enrollment," not once but twice already during installation and initial setup (see last week's article). Enrollment was kinda fun the first time, tolerable the second time, but would be distinctly boring if I had to do it a third time.
Hoping against hope, I next tried shutting everything down, rebooting the computer, and trying again. It was not likely to work, since ending an unresponding program through Task Manager means it gets shut down while stuck in some bad state, so when you fire it up again, it may not work right.
Wonder of wonders. It worked fine this time, and went automatically to my own speaker profile. I turned on the microphone (ctrl-alt), then went back to my document by saying "file menu," which drops down the Microsoft Word file menu, then said "one" because that is the number next to my most recently opened document. And up it came.
I have now decided to say "dash dash" as a substitute for emdash. Later, when the document has been otherwise completed, I can do a manual search and replace in Word to find all the "--" and replace them with "—".
To many writers—certainly and obviously, to this one!—the Em and the En dash are as important as other punctuation marks, and L&H need to repair this omission.