Interview Editing Guidelines

Your job is to take the transcript(s) of an interview and turn it from spoken English into written English.

General

• Read through the last issue of the magazine to get a feel for what we’re aiming at as far as the style and tone and such. We’ll be putting together a house style guide over the next couple issues for reference, but until then, imitate past issues of the magazine and/or ask your section editor.
• You’ll usually have two or three transcripts to work from. Choose the best one and work from that, referring to the other transcripts if you need to.
• You’ll have to rewrite a lot of the interview to make it flow well as written English, and you do have license to change small things here and there to make it work that way, but you need to keep the original voice of the interviewee as much as possible. We don’t want anyone suing us for changing what they said. :)
• Clean up punctuation (missing commas, incorrect dashes (we use em-dashes), etc.) and capitalization.
• Clean up sentence fragments and run-on sentences.
• Get rid of “uh”s and “um”s. Get rid of “like”s but make sure the original meaning is still there.
• Get rid of excess “you know”s and “And”s at the beginnings of sentences and such. Not all of them are excess.
• To show the interviewee they’re interested, the interviewer will often say a word or two — “Uh-huh” or “Right” or “Really?” or something. Most of these can be cut. (Use your good sense; if it changes or loses the meaning, don’t cut it.)

Submitting

Send the completed file as a Word file to your section editor.