Reduct Transcription Guidelines - Grammatical rules
- Grammatical rules
Full stops
Full stops end a declarative statement and its usage is pretty straightforward. One common error is using question marks instead of full stops in indirect questions.
Incorrect
She asked him what he meant?
Correct
She asked him what he meant.
Exclamation marks
Exclamation marks should be used sparingly, and only when absolutely required.
Examples
Yay! We finally completed it.
What a great offer! Sign me up for it.
Question marks
Question marks are used at the end of interrogative statements and direct questions.
Examples
Can we go back to the previous section if we have enough time remaining?
She asked him, “What did you mean?”
There’s always better ways of saying things, right?
Didn’t I just hear you say, “I have no money left”?
You wanna be as accurate as possible in matters as serious as grammar, you know?
Help us understand what happened, okay?
Apostrophe (’)
An apostrophe is used to denote possession and contractions.
Examples
Reduct’s employees
Jess’ clothes
My parents’ house (note the usage in words ending with S and plural nouns)
We’ve, they’re, aren’t, couldn’t,
It is also used to denote decades:’70s,’80s,’90s
Capitalization
The first word of the transcript needs to be capitalized if it is the start of a new sentence. If it seems like a continuation of a sentence, start with small letters.
Example
go there in December. That’s when there aren’t many tourists and you get the place almost to yourself.
(The audio here is picking up in the middle of a sentence. As with transcripts that end in the middle of a sentence, you also don’t need to add a dash before ‘go’ when starting afresh with a transcript.)
