Q: Enhanced dictation becoming clumsy.

Same here and a few more, like capitalising a word after a ',' (comma).

Can you teach it?

The absolute number one error that is driving me nuts.  Most of the time, I get a capitalized word after a comma.  How can this error occur?  It is a basic grammatical rule.  Sentences do not end with a comma.

I have been experiencing similar problems, except in Mountain Lion. See here:

Dictation behaviour with spaces and sentence starts

As I posted there,  this behaviour started suddenly for me a short while ago. As you can see just before the word "this", Dictation placed a double space Where it should not,  and as above capitalised when I paused before saying the word "where". Aha,… Another double space...

What seemed positive about this change is that whereas previously when you paused, the cursor was always glued to the last letter of the last word, and when you resume speaking it did not insert a gap;  this had to be done manually,  at least for me. Now, that little bug (or feature?) has gone but the extra space thing is just in overdrive. As you can see at the beginning of this paragraph, I also get a single space at the beginning of each paragraph.

While serving our country in the United States Navy, I sustained a serious injury that resulted in the loss of most of my left hand. When I told the sales Genius at the Apple Store that I was writing a novel on my iPhone using Siri, He capitalized on my handicap and convinced me to buy an expensive Mac, Promising that it could translate speech to text better and give me more control. He even sold me an expensive condenser microphone by convincing me that I wouldn't get accurate translations without it. Unfortunately, Dictation in Mavericks is so buggy that I'm back to translating with Siri on my iPhone!

I'm really having a hard time wrapping my finger around the concept that my iPhone is smarter than my Mac... I have been dealing with this issue for over a year and now they're saying that the You'llSemite upgrade Will NOT have Siri. That just blows me away. Kicking out "enhanced dictation" for Siri should be a no-brainer.

This whole fiasco is just preposterous and almost laughable that the iPhone is more powerful than Mac. Can anyone recommend an alternative program, Or software? I really need to finish this novel, Even if it means buying a PC…

sorry to hear about you bum purchase.  never believe a salesman not even at Apple, test before you buy. 

As to Siri, I do not understand why that is not in the Mac.  I have posted a request to Apple to do so. Maybe others could do so too.

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Tried adjusting my speech, talking fast after a comma.  Usually doesn't help.

I'm wondering if I should update immediately to Yosemite.  Heard anything about whether this is better?

Steve

It is light years better

I wish that were true in the case of dictation. What I am finding is that it seems to have forgotten some of the training that it learned before. That's okay. But, the internal capitalization seems to be just as big a problem as it was before.

It's very interesting that I am finding right now, That this works better in Safari, Than it does in word. Though you can see a few capitalizations after commas in the previous sentence. Just before I updated to Yosemite, I found that highlighting a word and speaking it over would at least substitute a non-capitalized version of the word.

Right now that still seems be working in the mail program, Or even here. But it does not work in Word no matter how many times I correct it.

It's really baffling to understand why dictation should work differently in different applications. Perhaps there are some things in word I can turn off, But I haven't found them yet.

Nice one, I had only tried it in Word and indeed it behaves different in Safari. 

Have you reported this issue to Apple?  I have.

@rick268: "It is light years better"

My experience with Yosemite is that the dictation got WAY worse. It capitalizes so many words so randomly that it is almost unusable.

I finally took the plunge and upgraded my Mountain Lion to Mavericks as a last resort. The enhanced dictation is now working very efficiently. I have however just noticed that it functions better in MS Word than when speaking to this HTML box… (a few edits required) I have seen this type of issue mentioned elsewhere.

I found that the solution to this problem is simply to turn off enhanced dictation. I no longer get any of the issues described above.

Yes, daxelrad, if you don't use a program, then none of the bugs in that program will affect you.

That's a rather snarky response. What I meant was, that you can still use dictation, just don't use the enhanced feature (in other words uncheck the box) and everything else works the way it always has.