It has been shown, with tasks specifically designed for well-controlled laboratory research, that task-irrelevant speech is more distracting when it is presented to the right ear (as right-ear presentation has privileged access to the left hemisphere that plays a dominant role in language processing). This is called the right-ear disadvantage. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the right-ear disadvantage generalizes to more applied, less well-controlled, tasks. Students were asked to write short stories while they were hearing task-irrelevant sound, either normal or spectrally-rotated speech, which they were to ignore. The sound was either presented to the right or to the left ear. The participants produced less written text when they were exposed to normal speech in comparison with rotated speech. However, this difference was just as large when the sound was presented to the right as to the left ear. In all, the semanticity of speech seems to disrupt output writing processes, but there was no evidence of a right-ear disadvantage with this task, probably because writing is not an experimentally controlled task. This study shows that the applied consequences of right-ear disadvantage are limited.