Two things. 1. How do you all handle long quotations? One speaker for a HIT last night was explaining how to handle a certain situation by performing a dialog with himself. I won't post the transcript here because I don't think CW likes that, but here's a snippet of how the first bit began: Then he goes on talking to Ron like that for 125 words (682 characters) before breaking, and he only broke to get into a back-and-forth with this hypothetical person that doesn't exist, changing speakers, talking to him. I wrote it down like this, somewhat like you would in a novel but without indentations: There's another long part where he's just talking to theoretical Ron, that goes on for 174 words (851 characters). At first I was going to break the long one-way dialog into paragraphs, but it looked strange to have two or more paragraphs in quotations all by themselves. I tried to find the correct way to do this on Google, but just about every place I found told you to blockquote things like that, and you can't do that here. I've seen quotations that span multiple paragraphs that have open quote on the first paragraph, but no close quote, in news articles before. But that looked strange too. I ended up keeping the two large one-way dialogs in single paragraphs even though they were 700-800 characters, and as you've just seen, the back-and-forth I split up. This is the first time I've ever had to do that. Most times when people are recounting conversations, they are always short enough to deal with, without breaking the style guide. Which leads me to.. 2. Have any of you submitted a HIT to CW and had it approved well before anyone could have possibly looked at it? The HIT I just spoke of was 13 minutes long (took me 39 to transcribe and an ungodly length of time to edit), yet was approved (grade 9!) within 3 minutes: It couldn't have been graded, edited, or listened to while reading the text. I question whether it could even be read in five minutes. And it was not an auto-approval: I'm not complaining. That was a $5.85 HIT thanks to that grade. But now I have no idea if I did it right or not. At least not until the full edit comes in. What if it gets heavily edited? Why did I get a 9, then? And which version is right, the edited copy, or the approval for a 9? I am very confused about this.
OK. I'll take a swing here. Personally, I think you did it correctly, except that I believe it really is the rule, odd-looking as it seems, to use no closing quote on a monologue that spans several paragraphs, until the final paragraph ends. So I would have done that and broken up the monologue parts per length guidelines. Otherwise, sounds like you handled the dialogue well and probably put more effort into doing so than some would have! :thumb: I agree with you that three minutes is not time enough for anyone to read it. Plus, that's not even counting time that your transcript would have had to get loaded into its new HIT interface, launched into MTurk, and accepted. Maybe that is just a few seconds, but still! And you're also correct that the message you got does not look like an auto-approve. I have not ever had a HIT manually approved in so short an amount of time that it made me suspicious, no. So this case is really interesting! As for the grade, if it's heavily edited and the editor chooses to decrease the grade and it's an experienced editor, then your grade might change. But that's a not-insignificant series of if's! If you want feedback before the Full Edit arrives, though, I would just open a support ticket with CW and ask them if you can get details on whether they would have wanted you to handle the job the way you did. The editor may or may not give you a full explanation of their editing choices, so this might be something you'd want to do either way. Hope that helps. I'll update with anything else I find out. ETA: PM'd you with a bit more.
Thanks for the reply. I responded to your PM, and thank you for that as well. To keep the discussion public and therefore useful, I was going to break up the paragraphs and use a single quote to start each one, until the last one which would also get a close quote. Not being able to find any type of guide on that really scared me away from it though. The CW style guide was of no help at all. To the contrary, have you looked at the example transcript lately now that you're an experienced transcriber? It has 900+ character paragraphs, filler words, paragraphs and sentences beginning with and/but/so, the title of a blog and the podcast aren't in quotes, etc. Not very good
Sure! Yeah, that is a thing with them, that you should just use regular grammar rules whenever in doubt and not told differently. You can effectively make a case that this is what you did, any time, and they should not be hard on you (provided you were not just missing the fact that they did in fact ask that you do it differently). I have found them to be good about this, especially if you know that style guide cold and know what's not in it. I have looked at that example transcript. Oh yes, I have. It made me :twitch: also. I am very happy to say that there is an entirely new one to go along with the revised Style Guide (all still in the approval process and not yet released), because I agree with you that all examples should actually reflect the company's style. Radical, I know.
The current CW Sample Transcript contains this: Sure hope I’m not going all TMI on you. But in lieu of... Since the conjunction "But" begins a sentence (fragment), I wondered about the style guide's advice regarding removal of "'And, But, Or, So' when they start a sentence...." I asked CW about that, and received a reply explaining that the conjunction is of course necessary in this case. That is clear enough. Still, my grammatical skills are limited, and (in some other specific cases) I may struggle to determine whether or not to remove "'And, But, Or, So' when they start a sentence...."
Hey, hapless! Yes, I wrote that Sample Transcript. The reason that "But" is not removed there is that as a fragment, the rule that you should keep a fragment in when it gives information not mentioned elsewhere trumps the rule that you should take "But" out. In other words, when there's plenty of context, making that "But" (or "And" or "Or" or "So") definitely unnecessary, you can feel free to take it out. However, in this case, the fragment is short enough to need every word it has, to do a good job of providing the extra info it's in there for. Whenever you're in doubt about whether to remove those words from the start of a normal sentence, though, I recommend you leave them in. That is the safest. The point of taking them out is that you only do it when you are sure the speaker is just using them in place of "uh" or other verbal stumbling, and they don't really convey extra info. Hope that helps! Post again if not.
Thanks. The style-guide point that initially confused me was this: > ... Remove filler words, [...] unless they are absolutely* necessary to indicate meaning. Do the same for "And, But, Or, So" when they start a sentence, .... * (Emphasis added.) (Here, I've left out the rest of that paragraph, though a full reading is necessary for understanding.) "Absolutely" is a strong word, which perhaps I misinterpreted in this case. Considering the fragment, "But in lieu of...," I was initially unsure as to whether and why I should consider its opening conjunction "absolutely" necessary. The confusion was mine. The simple question was whether to keep or discard that conjunction. ... We keep it if it is "necessary". If it is at all necessary, then it is absolutely necessary, is it not? ;-) ... What could be simpler? This is all so crystal-clear to me now! ;-) (Well, almost.) In short, I was confused about exactly how to interpret that part of the style guide. Thanks for clarifying.