Dictionary review transcription

Last week, we did reviews on monolingual online dictionaries in our English class. What was special about this task was that we worked in groups and had to record ourselves with our smartphones. Everyone talked freely, without much thought (and personally, I liked it because it was different from usual tasks) - but we should have guessed there is a hitch somewhere. :-)

Most of us don't like to hear recordings of ourselves (I wonder why that is, some smart person should investigate it...) but for this task we had to listen to our own recording and write out the transcript of what we said. Here is mine (I assume it's okay to leave out the uhs and ahs that are only natural in spoken language):

The Macmillan dictionary has also some other very cool features, for example there is "Word of the Day", which is today, for example, "planetary"...it's rather useless, but it's there. Then we also have a BuzzWord (where is it..here). It changes every week and it seems to be a rather new or unusual word..and if you click on the BuzzWord you can read a whole article relating to this word. This week's word, for example, is duffin, which is apparently a mixture of a muffin and a doughnut..nice to know...and then there is also the Open Dictionary where you can add your own words, so most of the words there are rather informal.

When listening to the voice recording, I instantly noticed that I had used the word "also" in the wrong place in the first sentence. It should be "The MacMillan dictionary also has [...]" I suppose also overused the phrase "for example", for I said that three times in such a short talk...in my defence, we did have a lot of examples to show, but I could have expressed it differently. I also have the feeling that I didn't say quite as much as other people, although I might only get this impression because our video is longer than many others.

You see, I can be very self-critical, but of course I found positive aspects too. For instance, I was surprised (in a positive way) that my accent did not sound quite as American as I feared it would. :-) I am also happy with the fact that I managed to speak in relatively full and coherent sentences even though I was searching for information on the website while the voice recording was done.