November
2007
Verbatim strikes again
I have just spent two or three days editing a bunch of interviews for a client because he mistakenly thought he wanted them verbatim but in fact after reading the first few he realised they were rather hard to analyse. They read something like this: ‘So can I just ask you what, how, how, how … erm, what, I mean how er was it, how was it that you, when you were erm, thinking about the, the space programme, how was is that you er eventually de, de, decided to pull out of the project?’ When they were edited to remove excess ‘verbage’ the interviews (which were incidentally nothing to do with the space programme, I do respect client confidentiality!) were reduced in length by between 10 and 20 percent! So be really sure when you say you need verbatim - it’s a costly mistake, especially if you then have to pay for two to three days of editing! For more information see the information about Verbatim versus intelligent verbatim transcription on my website.