transcribing question

[Linda]

In a deposition, if a speaker is reading off a document and they keep saying "open parentheses, blah, blah, blah, close parentheses", do you put the actual (  )  or do you write the words "open parentheses" and "close parentheses"?   I've always used the actual ( ) but am looking over a transcript someone did for me and they put the actual words.   Is this a subjective thing that it really doesn't matter which way you do it?  Opinions, please.

[Mary Jo Cochran]

Sounds like that person lacked ---.  Let's use this scenario:  Suppose an attorney read a quote such as:

 

Mr. Jones, did a good job.  And the attorney said:

"Mr. Jones comma did a good job period."

Which way would you transcribe it?

[Marge Teilhaber (TILE hobber)]

Mary Jo's got it right.  And that's even in a video.  

I'm assuming there's other doozies in the transcript from this person, and I'd look closely at their work.

[Mary Ann Payonk]

Hi, all.  If you-all are saying using words like comma, period, parens, quote, I do it myself from time to time.  If your witness tells you clearly where those parens end, no reason you can't put that material in parentheses.  But if they don't, in my opinion, esp/when I don't have the document, I'm not going to take it upon myself to guess what's inside the parens.  Sometimes you can tell, sometimes you can't tell.  In the very next post here there's a question about medical/legal vs. medicolegal, and one of the responses says basically to put what they say -- they get what they get.  Sounds like you're bothered by using the words because that's not the way you would do it yourself.  Can you fault the reporter for being verbatim?  I would say there's more than one way to skin a cat, there are many different styles out there, and it's simply a matter of style.  Marge and others might not like it - and I can tell you don't - but they're probably fans of the serial comma as well.  If you personally don't like it and would like things done differently going forward, let the reporter know.  I just don't think it's that big a deal to require the transcript to be corrected.  It's a pfffffft, IMO.

M.A.

[Marge Teilhaber (TILE hobber)]

Definitely a fan of the serial comma.  How'd you know??!!  <gg>!!   Anyway, I dock my proofreader (at her suggestion) $.50 for each blatant error she misses.   I don't dock for missing the last serial comma.  I do dock for run-on sentence or comma before, say, however but not after.    (She gets $1 bonus when she has missed zero blatant errors.  Whoopdidoo, I know, but still!)

[Sandy Graf]

When working for a nice CR firm, they taught me to make the reading as smooth as possible.  If it makes sense to leave out the words and put in the parentheses, then that's what I do.  If it needs the attention of the word, then I put the words.  Each depo could be different in my opinion.  Sometimes I want to do things the same way every time and that's just my rule, but I've learned that every depo, every witness, every attorney is different, so I use my best judgment every depo.

[Rosalie DeLeonardis]

Now I just use the actual punctuation marks without the words, but when I was first out of school one firm I worked with preferred me to use the actual words spoken as opposed to the punctuation marks. 

An example of the way the one agency had me do things:  "Mr. Jones, comma, did a good job, period."