Transcribing Guidelines

General

• Transcribe the interview exactly as you hear it. Don’t worry about cleaning it up and making it look pretty — we’ll clean it up in the editing stage, so just write down what you hear verbatim. (Once you start transcribing, you’ll realize why I’m saying this. Spoken English is surprisingly different from written English. Lots of sentence fragments.)
• Exception to rule #1: you don’t need to transcribe “um”s and “uh”s. But do transcribe “like”s, because they actually provide useful information to the editors when massaging the interview into some semblance of written English.
• If you find your brain going numb, take a break. Seriously.
• Expect it to take up to 2–3 times longer than the interview itself, depending on how fast you type. You’ll find yourself rewinding a lot to catch parts you missed. (The alternative is slowing down the recording so you don’t have to rewind, but I’m not entirely sure this is faster.)
• I’ve found that closing your eyes helps a lot. (Only if you’re a touch typist, that is. If not, it’s kind of a bad idea. :))

Software

Express Scribe is a free program (for Mac, PC, and Linux) that makes it easy to transcribe audio.

Of course you can always just open up an audio player (iTunes, etc.) in one window and a text editor (WordPad, Word, TextEdit, etc.) in another. Find something that works well for you.

Submitting

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