A meditation CD where sentences go on and on and on...

Hello everyone,

Marjatta the transcriptionist here. I'm hoping I can get some of your suggestions.

I'm transcribing a meditation CD and the sentences go on and on and on. If I were to transcribe them verbatim, they would look like run-on sentences and would be very difficult to read.

I was under the impression that using (...) is for trail offs or to indicate unsaid thoughts. But could it also be used to indicate pauses in incredibly long sentences?

Before I poke my eyeballs out with a pencil, I thought I would check with you experts first.

Thanks a bunch!

Marjatta

Thanks BigWords. That's what I was thinking, but I didn't want to break any official grammatical 'rules', so to speak.

In fact, I'm actually proofreading one of the members of my team and she just put in periods to break up these long thoughts, but the start of each new sentence was actually the continuation of one big L...O...N...G thought so the new sentence was incomplete and didn't look right either.

Using (...) seemed to me to be the only way to indicate these pauses, while at the same time indicating that it was one huge long thought.

On the other hand, these readers are meditating to relax, so these long drawn-out sentences may actually put them to sleep! LOL

Thanks for your input!

M

Thanks Derek.

That's the challenge of transcribing. In most cases, we can change a little bit of how the speaker speaks (i.e. changing 'there's' to 'there are' when the speaker is talking about plural things or 'it's' to 'it has' when they say something about the past like 'It's been').

Initially, I thought of making each sentence in this mediation CD be separate as you suggested by the use of shorter sentences, but I realized that this might break up the flow.

Oh heck! This is tough, but with your suggestions, I am sure I can work through it!

Thanks Derek!

Marjatta

JoNightshade said:

No thoughts, except that I would already be poking my eyes out.

Click to expand...

Hey Jo,

I already have a pencil sharpened and ready to go! Feel free to join me! LOL

M