Dad insisted that every journalist learn to touch type, back when that meant a typewriter and carbon copies and no way to fix a mistake except to start the page again. He was right then. He is still right now. But typing is no longer the only way words get onto a page, and the field has changed enough to be worth a fresh look.
Why touch typing still wins
For real writing, the kind where you are thinking and composing at the same time, nothing beats touch typing. It is fast, it is silent, and it keeps your eyes on the words instead of the keys. Dad's argument has not weakened with a single advance in technology, and if you only take one thing from his factsheet, take this: learn to type properly and you buy yourself time for the rest of your career.
If you never actually learned, or you still hunt and peck faster than you would admit, go and fix it. My touch-typing site TypeVaders drills it through lessons, a speed test and a game, free and built for a full keyboard. Twenty minutes a day for a few weeks and you will type without looking. Dad would have made you do it.
Dictation in the field
Where dictation earns its keep is away from the desk. Voice-to-text on a phone is now good enough to bang out rough notes, a quick intro, or a description of a scene while it is in front of you and your hands are full. It is not where you write the finished piece. It is where you capture the raw material before it gets away.
Use it for the things you will forget first: the colour of the room, the exact wording on a sign, the way someone said something before you had time to write it down. Open Voice Memos, Notes, Google Recorder, Otter, whatever is already on the phone, and talk for thirty seconds. Do it while the scene is still warm. Future you will be grateful, mostly because future you is lazy and will pretend he remembers everything.
Do not dictate quotes unless you are clearly marking them as memory, not transcript. If someone said something important, record the audio properly or write the quote down. Voice-to-text is useful. It is not a witness. It guesses. It mangles names. It hears "MEAA" and gives you something that looks like a medication warning. Treat it like a notebook with terrible handwriting.
Cleaning up dictated copy without losing your voice
Dictated text reads like speech, because it is. It rambles, it repeats, it forgets where the full stops go. So you treat it as a first draft and you sub it hard, the same way Dad would have attacked a sloppy par. The tool gets the words down fast. You still do the writing.
The best workflow is boring, which is annoying because boring is usually right. Dictate the rough note. Label it with the date, place and subject. Clean it up later at a keyboard. Keep the original audio or note until the piece is published, because the one line you delete in a fit of tidiness will be the one line you need three hours later.
What stays the same
The craft of getting a clear sentence onto the page. Whether it arrives through ten fingers or your voice, someone still has to make it good, and that someone is you. Read Dad's originals: You Must Be a Touch Typist and Typewriting and Handwriting.