Miskates Happen
I have to turn off the captions for myself when I deliver a webinar.
It might help some participants to see an AI-generated track of my words, but I can’t see them on my screen. For the most part they’re a reasonable transcript of what I’m saying; whenever I see the wrong thing transcribed in the moment it trips me up, it breaks my flow and I feel I have to do something to set it right.
But I can’t, not in that moment. Because I have something more important to do. If someone else doesn’t understand and needs to, they can ask, but I have to keep my focus on presenting.
And all of this is not all that different from the situations faced by PhD candidates in the viva and during their preparation.
If you find typos, just make a note of them. Where are they? What’s the correction?
If you find something unclear, make a note. What’s the problem? How could you make it clear?
Once you’ve made your notes, move on. Read some more, make some more notes. On to the next prep.
In the viva, acknowledge the mistake, correct it simply if you need to and then move on to the next question or next part of the discussion. There’s more important things to do than dwell on mistakes in the viva.