# Correcting yourself as you speak

Say "scratch that" and keep going — the words you cancelled never make it to the page.

Everybody misspeaks. The usual dictation experience is that you say the wrong thing, sigh, stop the
recording, delete the sentence and start again.

You do not have to. Cancel out loud and carry on — Blabb drops the words you took back, along with
the phrase you used to take them back, and keeps only what you said instead.

## How it sounds

You say:

```
Send the report to Michael on Tuesday, scratch that, on Thursday.
```

You get:

```
Send the report to Michael on Thursday.
```

The cancelled words are gone, and so is "scratch that". Nothing is left for you to tidy up.

## The phrases that work

There is no fixed list to memorise. These are the obvious ones, and anything else that plainly
cancels what you just said will also work:

| Phrase | Typical use |
| --- | --- |
| "scratch that" | Cancelling the words immediately before it |
| "no wait" | Catching yourself mid-sentence |
| "make that" | Substituting a value — "three o'clock, make that four" |
| "correction" | The formal one, if that is how you speak |
| "I mean" | The one people use without thinking |
| "actually" | Same, when it genuinely reverses what you said |

Only the words you actually replaced are dropped. Everything you said before the correction stands.
And if you correct yourself twice, only the final version survives — so a sentence you fumble three
times still comes out clean.

> [!NOTE]
> These are only treated as commands when they clearly are commands. "I mean what I say" keeps its
> words, because that phrase is carrying meaning rather than cancelling anything.

## When it does not apply

The **Original** style types exactly what the speech model heard, including "scratch that" and the
words you meant to throw away. Self-correction is part of cleanup, so it needs one of the other five
styles. [Fix typos](/docs/cleanup-styles/overview/) is the lightest one that includes it.

## Getting the habit

This is the feature people forget they have. Two things make it stick:

- **Do not stop and restart.** The moment you notice a mistake, say "scratch that" and continue in
  the same breath. Stopping the recording costs you far more time than the retraction does.
- **Correct forwards, not backwards.** Say the replacement immediately after the cancelling phrase.
  "Tuesday, scratch that, Thursday" works. "Scratch that" followed by a long pause and a new
  sentence gives Blabb nothing obvious to substitute.

## See also

- [Spoken layout commands](/docs/cleanup-styles/spoken-layout/) — line breaks, paragraphs and lists.
- [Numbers, symbols and addresses](/docs/cleanup-styles/numbers-and-symbols/) — how spoken figures come out.
- [Cleanup styles](/docs/cleanup-styles/overview/) — which styles do this.