I stole this practice from someone. Mamet, I think. I invite you to steal it from me.
Anytime you run an audio interview, do at least a few minutes of the transcription yourself, by hand.
Spoken language is a mess. Even the most articulate conversationalists constantly reset verbs, abandon sentences, staple one idea to the next, and interrupt themselves and everyone else.
And I know you know that.
But there's a difference between knowing something in your brain and knowing it with your fingers. Transcribing real dialogue onto the page is time consuming and tedious. But if you care about communication, it is a discipline worth enduring and a lesson worth learning.
1 comment:
I really related to the part about transcribing the silence. When I transcribe interviews, I do a first pass with an automated tool and then a careful manual listen, which catches the overlapping speech and filler words I'd otherwise miss. You're right that the pauses often carry more meaning than the words around them; I always mark them with [pause] so the read feels closer to how it actually sounded.
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