CW does want short sentences and paragraphs. They have hammered that into us for years. That's the first thing I look for when I'm grading, etc. If they have long sentences/paragraphs, I can guarantee an 8, if there are other problems, the grade might go on down.
Ooh, thank you for that. I usually look on my qualification page to see my rank, but I like this better. The funny thing is that I have their HIT page open all the time, and I never noticed that. Anyway, here's mine: MTurk Qualifications: PPT: 91 Grader: 2 New Editor: 98 I still think it's hilarious that my editing score is higher than my PPT. HI-larious I say! ._0
I said so many curse words today, it was ridiculous. I did a bunch of those bulk express HITs, and some of them got graded today. Out of all the ESL speakers I've transcribed, I finally stopped fixing their grammar...even though the style guide states we should make them grammatically correct. I got tired of all the feedback about "paraphrasing" and such, so I transcribed that guy's speech the way he spoke it. I got a *7* on one of them with a comment about grammar errors. Bleep me. Most of the rest were 8s. The 9s never stick, but those 7s sure do. I've only seen two of the final edits so far (few changes), but I will definitely be emailing CW about this. You can't ding me for fixing grammar AND ding me for not fixing it. Pick one dammit. And why don't any of the other editors raise grades when they don't make any changes? They've lowered my grades before, but I have NEVER had an editor raise my grade when they didn't have to make changes in the final edit, and that has happened a lot. :::deep breath::: All righty, I think I'm going to call it a night. I've been working all evening, and now I need a drink. Congrats to Whimsy and hapless on the scores. You're almost there.
I had a problem with a HIT I submitted, some of the audio was missing at the end but of course I didn't realise this, I just thought that's where the audio ended and they'd got the time wrong on the HIT title. I got graded 0 for submitting an incomplete transcription. The full edit that I checked on afterwards had the second bit transcribed by someone else and the edits that had been made to it were thoroughly brutal. Whole sentences and paragraphs removed or paraphrased. So I don't actually ever get a sense that I know what I am supposed to be doing. And, I'm pretty sure my PPT started at 85 and getting to 90 despite lots of 6s and 7s is not too bad. I've been wary of stepping my toe back into the CW waters but might give it a shot today. The support and advice in this thread is so valuable, by the way, thank you all for sharing.
I've been wary of that possibility (though it hasn't yet happened to me). I try to remember (but I don't always remember) to check the audio file's duration against the duration listed on the HIT page, before I begin transcribing. I might suggest sending a note to CW support. (If you don't yet have a support account, you can create one at support.castingwords.com.) You can let them know what happened. You might also tell them that you plan to check the file duration (as I suggested above) to prevent this problem on future jobs.
As an addendum to that last reply, this is another cautionary note about a different but related error that I've mentioned before: Just before you finish a transcript, check to be sure that your audio software is set to view the entire audio file. (In the audio software that I use, it is treacherously easy to mistakenly view a playback window that only includes part of the file.) __________ BTW, these and other reminders should be noted in your personal transcription "checklist" -- you do have a checklist? ... No? Then I'd suggest that you create one. My checklist summarizes key points from the style guide, as well as from experience, and also includes notes about potential pitfalls such as we are discussing here. (If I work with other transcription requesters, then I make separate checklists because they each have different rules.)
So true. My suggestion (take it or leave it): Try avoiding the difficult speakers for a little while. Take a few jobs where the speech is mostly quite clear. Maybe try some of the really short little jobs too, just for a break. If you take a few short jobs, you may have a laugh (laughter's good) when someone gives you an 8 for a virtually perfect transcript of a crystal-clear one-minute segment ... or when someone gives you a well-deserved 9 for one of those, and yet the auto-grade is 8. ;-. That's where I was at, getting 8's for even the easiest jobs ... but this week my PPT is up to 96 and they've put me on auto-9's??!! (Not too bad, as I've only been at this since last month.) There is hope. LOL! Forge ahead! Onward and, hopefully, upward!
Are you gonna let me come anywhere near the '500 character' approximate limit on paragraph length, or are you gonna split my perfectly reasonable 350's?
They don't let you even close to 500. I've had under 400 split. I don't think some of these people understand what a paragraph even is. I'd hate to see what they'd do to a novel manuscript.
'Paragraphs' ain't what they used to be, alas. Once upon a time, a cow-orker complained about my supposedly cumbersome paragraphs in business email. IIRC even a fairly short 5-sentence paragraph bothered him. I obligingly kept my email paragraphs super-short after that. I also sent some emails with just one sentence per 'paragraph' (as in this post). Nobody complained about that.
I graded a noobie last night. Her first transcript. She took the short sentence. But not paragraph to heart. It was so choppy. That you couldn't even read. Without problems. It was one huge paragraph. I really don't look at the length of the sentence/paragraph as such. I check the sentence length to see if it can naturally break anywhere, but not be choppy. Then at least 2 sentences per paragraph. Most of my paragraphs have 2 -4 sentences. Sometimes you can't help but have huge sentences. Yesterday I transcribed one of the preaching jobs. This guy has a habit of stringing a lot of things together that cannot be cut into smaller sentences. This will give you a long sentence and a long paragraph. Ex: For this was the king's manner toward all who knew law and justice, those closest to him being Carshena, Shethar, Admatha, Tarshish, Meres, Marsena, and Memucan, the seven princes of Persia and Media, who had access to the king's presence. I've actually had editors mark down on me for long sentences like this, but for some reason, they didn't correct it. Wonder why? They just clipped my score.
This is why I am more than happy to just do the grader, review and rate audio hits than the transcriptions anymore. I've become very protective of my PPT score now
I'm in the same camp, more-or-less. With occasional exceptions (or inconsistencies), I'll remove a simple 'false start' lacking any meaningful substance, but keep a 'broken sentence' bearing any informative content (however trivial or irrelevant or tangential). From the "What If" style page: "If there's some information there, you need to type it out." (I take that fairly literally.) The following examples merely illustrate my (alleged) current practice (whether right or wrong). Fake example 1: "The 13th annual meeting of the franchise committee was a productive one. In keeping with longtime tradition, most in attendance wore squirrel costumes. Actually, that's...Of course, everyone applauded loudly when Jack ascended to the podium to deliver his inspirational keynote." In that case, of course, I'd remove the false start. Fake example 2: "The 13th annual meeting of the franchise committee was a productive one. In keeping with longtime tradition, most in attendance wore squirrel costumes. Actually, that's one of...I mean, just to...Originally we...Well, the squirrel thing is...Of course, everyone applauded loudly when Jack ascended to the podium to deliver his inspirational keynote." Here the false starts constitute an unfinished digression with a definite topic, promising but falling short of providing some sort of explanation as to why the attendees wore squirrel costumes. Since that information was merely promised but not provided, I would prefer to remove all of those false starts. Fake example 3: "The 13th annual meeting of the franchise committee was a productive one. In keeping with longtime tradition, most in attendance wore squirrel costumes. Actually, that's one of...I mean, just to...Originally we...Well, the squirrel thing is actually prescribed in the...Of course, everyone applauded loudly when Jack ascended to the podium to deliver his inspirational keynote." Now we're getting somewhere? Here we have at least a hint of 'information' indicating that the squirrel costume tradition was "prescribed in the" -- what? Was it prescribed in the committee's founding charter, perhaps? We don't know -- but something has almost been said here. I'd probably be compelled to keep the unfinished sentence: "The squirrel thing is actually prescribed in the...". These examples merely illustrate my current practice. I may be wrong. I'm not here to advise anyone, or to argue that I'm right. If I'm wrong, it ain't the first time or the last.
Thanks, hapless. I wish I could avoid them, but I only seem to find fast talkers, ESL speakers or really poor audio on CW. Time for another break, lol. I signed up to work for a few other companies and finally heard back from one of them. I'll have at least 2 companies to transcribe for now (I count mturk as one). The good news is that from what I can tell, some of those HITs were graded and edited by someone at CW. They fixed the grammar like I've been getting dinged for all along. My HITs in that batch that hadn't been graded yet, got graded after my cocktail hour. Most of them got 9s, some with good feedback. I feel better now. That crazy grader (it was someone BRAND new) was just the icing on the cake that was my craptastic day. I emailed CW with a loooong list of transcripts that had few or minor edits, as well as the name of that grader. They may not change any of it, but like you said, onwards and upwards.
I've spent a couple days looking over edits, the style guide, their example transcription. Just looking around. Trying to bring pieces together that still haven't clicked for me. "So" at the beginning of a sentence. Every second or third sentence, for example. Take them all out? Leave some? Leave them all because that's a quirk this podcaster is known for? The almost-sentence I referred to earlier was In this sentence I'm talking about me and my wife. Here's another. A sentence explaining the process. MyWife'sName and I.... Now I go back to talking about the process and the results. I also have the habit of stringing everything together with and. The transcriber tries to only take out the ones that begin a sentence. I took out MyWife'sName and I. When I looked at the example transcript, "so" was left in at the beginning of some sentences. Does this boil down to how it is used at the beginning of a sentence? The thing that blows for me is not being able to see the outcome of the Improve a Transcript jobs. I don't get to see the final edit, no matter what I improve it to. All 9s so far, except for two 8s. I try to keep sentences manageable and paragraphs between 4-6 lines. If the flow asks for more than that, I give it more. If I get dinged, I'm ok with that. I won't purposefully take what should be a last sentence of one paragraph and lob it on to the start of another just to make it look better. I want it to read well. I'm going to risk my 9 streak with Improves and try to keep things more verbatim. I just wish I could see what, if any, changes are made to those. Sorry for any typos. Typing with my thumbs from the nook and editing isn't fun. The cursor doesn't always play nice.
Some people use SO like some people use YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN? RIGHT? OK? If a speaker uses any word a lot, consider it as filler. You might leave an occasional SO to start a sentence and keep the flavor of the recording. But again, it gets down to the personal feelings of the editor. Nothing's in stone, but you shouldn't be marked down if they take a few SO's out of your transcript.
That is what I've noticed and what I've been doing in my editing. A transcriber can't tell from their small chunk that the speaker said "for example" 30 other times in the whole transcript. If I take it out, I don't consider that a mistake on the part of the transcriber. I've taken things like that out and still raised the transcriber's grade if they followed the style guide and everything else was correct. Same with commas and other changes I make for consistency. I don't consider that a bad reflection on a transcriber's work.
For those of you who did those recent Bulk Epress HITs, I noticed something. In the edits that didn't have an editor name (these are the ones I suspect were done by CW), I noticed something. They put quotes around every instance of the technical terms. Despite the feedback ? (I can't remember who it was) got and what I've read in English/grammar guides, this editor put quotes around these terms every time. For those of you who did those HITs, can you look at your edits when you get a chance to see if you can tell if this was CW or not? I think I've figured out which feedback is from them, and if a lack of an editor name means it's somebody from CW, these edits were done by them as well. If so, I'll be scrutinizing those edits to see exactly how they like things.
Ok. I've had a rough week and then reading the guides and the tips and the suggestions...holy hell! LOL =) I'm going to continue to do my best, because I like doing good work (the 8 vs 9 thing is a sting to my pride more than anything), but I have come to realize that a lot of this is subjective. There are editors of different experiences, expectations, time with this company...so many different things. We're all people, getting work to other people. As long as they're happy then I guess things are peachy. Happy customers refer cw to their contemporaries. More work. I like interviews and podcasts. Presentations with a panel of speakers or a group teleconference...I don't wanna and happily pass them up to someone who's capable and willing. It's also my hope that more people come across this forum before starting with cw. With a few questions/answers SO MANY noob mistakes could be avoided.