Oddly enough, their style guides approach ends of HITs differently. ClariTrans always wants you to close with a period regardless of the situation whereas Crowdsurf allows you to omit periods if you're 85% certain it's the middle of a sentence. I have a question for fellow transcriptionists: if a speaker starts a new sentence (apparent because of inflection of tone or length of pause) beginning with "And" do you tend to link it to the previous sentence by inserting a comma, or do you create a gramatically incorrect second sentence?
The only thing I have to say about this whole ClariTrans IS Crowdsurf can of worms is that regardless of where CrowdSurf came from, I'm not going to just assume their standards are the same as other companies because they were 'born out of' wherever, as it says here. Not even sure if I linked that right, but I'm under the impression that 'new company' means new changes, so it's again, extremely important to read the guidelines for EACH company, no matter what anyone says about that particular company's practices. As for your question, for me, this depends on the context of what's being said. It could really go two ways, like this: A: And blue. These are the colors of candy I found in my bag of Skittles. B: And, generally speaking, my pet walrus is not very friendly. But when I transcribe, I NEVER do something like this: C: , and, for the purposes of this example, this is something I would never do to begin a transcript. God knows if that helped or even answered your question, but I tried. *edited to remove random smileys... sigh.
It usually depends on how long the sentence will be with the comma there versus the period. I can't say that's the only thing though. All I can really say that pretty sums it up is "I know it when I see it". : /
Thanks for the replies. What I was more curious about was an example like: "I lazily jumped over the fence. (2 second pause) And it was the best thing I've ever done." Do you make one or two sentences? I've been doing them both ways btw, sometimes with a comma (if the pause wasn't too long and I think I can get away with it) and sometimes I just cave in and create a new sentence starting with "And" (which I hate doing)
That's a post I wrote that you've linked to, buttaflypixie (and, lol, one that you've thanked me for before), so I'll clarify for you. Besides clearing up for everyone the origins of CrowdSurf, the point of the post was not what you're assuming, which seems to be that the two style guides must definitely be the same just because one company is born from the other (although I did see the two styles as alike and really appreciate adaaam pointing out above that there's a difference in how CS wants the endings handled). The point of the post was this: when a new company is born from an old one with an iffy reputation, but in a way that apparently intends to make Turkers gloss over that fact, then Turkers have good reason to consider why the two companies would want to hide that. That's why in this case, I suggested assuming that CrowdSurf is likely to do business the same way that Claritrans does. Why? Because it's the safest thing for Turkers to *not* go in naively and assume that CrowdSurf will be much, much fairer and more reasonable than its parent, which has a demonstrated history of not being so reasonable. Had the "birthing" process been more on the up and up, I would have made a more optimistic recommendation. So I stick by what I said. However, I'd love for CrowdSurf to end up being a requester that doesn't give Turkers nasty surprises, because more good transcription shops are never a bad thing! Back to the topic... Two sentences. No, the second one is not all that grammatically correct. But Claritrans' style guide indicates a preference for breaking long sentences, even if you create a fragment to do so.
I almost screwed one up yesterday by using the standard beginning of a sentence "One way to...". Luckily I remembered it was "1 Way to..." before I submitted. Got a 4 rating, but it was relatively one of the easier ones I've done for them.
Thanks for the insight. Are you referring to: If so, that guideline never made sense to me. Run-on sentences are two or more independent clauses that have not been joined by a semi-colon or conjunction, and breaking them in two creates two complete sentences, never incomplete sentences. If there is a conjunction such as "and" then by definition it is not a run-on sentence, but simply a long sentence. It would be helpful if Claritrans clarified that guideline in greater detail.
Sorry your quote of Claritrans' guide doesn't come through; that's a buggy bit in the quote mechanism of the forum interface. But yes, I was referring to that. You're completely correct about the difference between run-on sentences and long (compound) sentences. However, despite the grammatical imprecision in the guide there, what I see is that the company is stating a preference for shorter sentences, even if they end up not being sentences but fragments as a result. I believe the gist of that is what they intend you to follow, and I'll be interested if they do fix their style guide to make it any clearer there.