Okay you guys, I did it! I totally didn’t listen to any of the audios until I was ready to actually start typing them. This is a big deal to me, I might just be that person that reads all reviews and even the back page of a book before actually reading it through. I know, I spoil it for myself half the time, but it’s who I am. Sigh.
Anyway, this week it is on to typing up some speeches. Now this sounds easy, or it did to me anyway. But when you listen to people talk, you don’t think about things like periods and paragraphs. You aren’t worried about formatting and punctuation, but when you are transcribing, apparently we have to make the words actually legible and clearly organized. Well, it’s a lot more difficult than you think! When you are writing something you can play around with things, and you have some freedom on punctuation, but in transcription you kind of have to play by the rules. From what I hear from my online coach here at Learn Legal Transcription classes each person I do work for may have different style guides, may want errors in speech included and those odd words like umms and ahhs. That could get even more difficult, so this is good practice for me.
The other thing I really have to practice is leaving TWO spaces at the end of sentences. Ugh. This is IMPOSSIBLE for me. Seriously, I want to shoot myself. I am practicing and practicing, and if I am thinking about it, I can do it, but as soon as my mind wanders, forget it. I don’t know about you but in school nowadays we only do 1 space after the end of a sentence, but apparently back when everything was typed up on actual typewriter they did TWO spaces because it made things easy to read. If you look up actual typewritten pages you will see that is true and why double spacing paragraphs came to be the norm I think. But it’s so hard to change now.
I think my family thinks I am nuts, because every time they say something I am thinking about typing it up and where I would place punctuation and paragraph breaks, haha. Ah well, they are used to my craziness. People are starting to learn that I am taking this course, so hopefully word gets out and I can get some referrals for work once I am ready.
Til next week! Mandy
