What’s Included?
Your Style
Your transcripts are your personal work of art, complete with your name on the title page. My job is to support you by polishing up your transcripts exactly the way you like them.
To make things easier for both of us, you can quickly fill out a list of preferences when we start working together. That way, we won’t spend time emailing back and forth during jobs; I’ll have your preference sheet handy to answer any questions I might have. For example, do you prefer Morson’s or Margie’s stylebook? The Oxford comma: love or hate?
What do I proofread?
- title page
- appearances
- index
- body of the transcript
- certificates
- witness review letters
- errata sheets
What errors do I catch?
- formatting (spacing of lines and words; alignment; inconsistencies on cover pages, appearance pages, indexes, and certificates)
- spelling (of words, names, e-mails)
- punctuation
- capitalization
- hyphenation
- numerals
- abbreviations
- dates
- Q’s and A’s and bylines
- homophones and commonly confused words (ensure/insure, affect/effect, forego/forgo, therefore/therefor)
- missing or transposed words
- general sense and context
What do I look up?
- attorney details: names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mails
- proper nouns
- technical terms
- uncommon words and phrases
- anything else I’m not 100% sure about
What references do I use?
- Morson’s English Guide for Court Reporters by Lillian Morson (2nd edition)
- Court Reporting: Bad Grammar/Good Punctuation by Margie Wakeman Wells
- The Gregg Reference Manual by William A. Sabin (10th edition)
- Dictionary.com and the Merriam-Webster medical dictionary