What If Style Guide

A bunch of suggestions for how to transcribe that you don't need to remember but we'd love it if you did!

Run-on/Complex Sentences

You'll find that many speakers do not use proper sentences. In fact, a lot tend to ramble on and on. As a transcriber you need to break these sentences up as much as possible WITHOUT changing the meaning. Remember, make it readable but accurate.

False Starts

Be true to the speaker, if they say "And then" then go off to a whole different sentence, you can safely ignore it. But if there's some information there, you need to type it out.

Titles

The titles of books, magazines, movies, tv shows, etc. should be put in quotes.

Yesterday I watched a report on "60 Minutes" about the difficulties of using new technology for non-tech savvy individuals.

Numbers

Spell out one through nine and use numerals for 10 and over. Use numerals for numbers with decimals, like 1.01. If the number is really large, like million or billion, spell that out.

John: There were nine of us.

Joe: Oh before I thought you said there were 10.

John: Nope, just nine and each worth 12 billion.

If there are more than one related numbers in a sentence, and one number is greater than nine, use all numbers.

Man: I only wanted 2 cats, but I ended up with 14.

If they are unrelated, then use both numbers and words.

John: Nope, just nine and each worth 12 billion.

Fractions

Spell out simple fractions and use hyphens.

Turker 1: Two-thirds of my CastingWords income is from bonus payments.

Decimals

Write decimals in figures. Put a zero in front of a decimal unless the decimal itself begins with a zero.

I bought 10.55 gallons of gas yesterday.
She only put in 0.98 gallons of gas because it was too expensive.
The minimum commission for a HIT is .05 of a cent.

Formatting larger numbers

If the customer asks for something special (like European number formatting), then do that.

But otherwise, format decimal places with a "." and use "," for thousands. Don't stick an extra space in.

Bad: 10.000

Good: 10,000

Bad: 10, 000

Good: 10,000

Bad: 1,23

Good: 1.23

Money

If the audio says "hundred thousand dollars" you can transcribe that as $100,000.

Non-Verbals

Mark long and/or important events in the audio in brackets.

[silence] - Insert in the event of silence.
[commercial break] - Insert if the show goes to a commercial
[laughter] - Insert if the group is laughing
[radio break] - Insert if there is a radio break, a time of ads, in between the show.
[laughs] - Insert if the speaker laughs
[music] - Insert if there's music.
[intro music] - Insert if there's a musical intro to the audio.
[applause] - Insert if the audience is clapping.
[phone ringing] - Insert if the phone rings.
[inaudible 0:00] - Insert if it's not possible to understand what is being said due to the volume. Only to be used by Editors, and must have a timestamp!.
[indecipherable 0:00] - Insert if it's not possible to understand what is being said. Only to be used by Editors, and must have a timestamp!
[xx] - Insert if you can't understand what is said (And are not editing).

Grammar

The English language has a large set of grammar rules, which most people break all the time. Clean it up the best you can without changing the meaning or the feeling of the speaker's words.

Sarcasm

Put [sarcastically] before the comment. Then when the sarcasm ends go to a new paragraph.

Spelled Out Words

The word needs to be in spelt form, but if they say the word and THEN spell it out, use hyphens to spell it out.

J-A-C-K

Questionable Spellings

Acceptable -> Preferred

& -> and
colour -> color
Okay -> OK
gonna -> going to
wanna -> want to
e-mail -> email
Web site -> website
internet -> Internet

Web Terms and Spellings

• eBay
• podcast
• JotSpot
• iPod
• vodcast
• vidcast
• Hotmail
• PayPal
• E*TRADE
• Amazon
• Travelocity
• O'Reilly
• micropayment
• Gmail
• MP3

IT Terms

• XHTML
• PHP
• Python
• Perl
• Ajax
• Javascript
• DHTML