Editing, what is your practice?

[Janiece]

On editing do you do a line-by-line edit, just start at the beginning and work your way to the end?

When I produce rough drafts I do a scan edit and then send them out.  After that I do my edit.  Doing that scan edit does make my "real" edit go faster.

What is your practice on editing?

[Jenny L. Griffin, CSR, RMR, CRR]

I scan the transcript by using the Eclipse feature where I click on Production/List Errors.  Up pops a box which contains all the weird things in the transcript - misspelled words, double Qs, etc.  It starts out with all the numbers in the transcript, which I skip over.  From there I can do a quick replace or a global.  I can hop out the that box and into the transcript to do a quick audio check as well. 

When I'm done with that, if I'm producing a rough draft for the attorneys, I may go through and check the spots I marked in the transcript while I was writing.  If I'm going to scope it myself, I start at the top and read through the end.  But I edit in Eclipse using the NaturallySpeaking Dragon Pro program, so I use voice commands to perform Eclipse macros in combination with using my regular external keyboard. 

Well, it's not really regular:http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/freestyle.htm

I have the Kinesis Freestyle V3.  The lightest and easiest touch ever!

[Mary Ann Payonk]

Rarely do I edit a rough draft other than the editing I do while writing.  On finals, I start at the beginning, read to the end, spellcheck, List Errors, index, done.

M.A.

[Martha R]

I go through and do scoping line by line.  After that's all done, I go back and do a final proofread.   It's time consuming to go back again, but I am always glad I did because I find a few pretty big mistakes where my eye glanced over them the first time.

 If I get too busy, I'll have someone scope the job for me and I will proofread it.

[Marge Teilhaber (TILE hobber)]

I carefully scope my own work line by line listening to audio.  If I have time, I do a second read-through on the screen first and then send to my proofreader.  If time is short, which is mostly the case, I send her the transcript and then I do the second read-thru on the screen.  Never ever fails that I find stuff that there's no way in hell a proofreader would ever have reason to flag.  It's literally ALWAYS worth the effort to do that horridly boring and awful second read-through.  I truly hate it.  But it never fails to save my butt.  I note obvious errors in hidden text to check the proofreader.  It's rare that all those errors are found, which is another reason the second read-through for me is so valuable.  It also gives me an idea of how many things I miss on that second read-through that the proofreader finds.