7 Basic Guidelines When Getting a Transcription Job

As much as you want to do transcription jobs in your own terms, you should still follow transcription companies’ guidelines on how they do it or how they wanted to see how the final document would look like.

If are now decided to be a transcriptionist, here are the basic guidelines that you should follow in case you have secured your job:

1. Accuracy

As much as possible, type all the words you hear from the speaker. Do not remove any words that you hear from them. Type all the words as verbatim as you can get. Type it as if you are the one listening to the speaker in person.

2. Use proper capitalization, punctuation and spelling.

Before document turn-over, make sure that all the words spoken are written with proper capitalization, punctuation and spelling.

3. Do not use phonetics or shortened words.

In transcribing, only type what you hear on the document with the correct spelling. Do not use phonetics and shortened words like: ‘u’ for ‘you’, ‘luv’ for ‘love’, ‘tnx’ for ‘thanks’ and the words alike.

4. Do not paraphrase, correct speaker’s grammars.

To further provide accuracy, never paraphrase or correct the speaker’s grammars. Also, make sure that you do not add information just to make the spoken words to sound right.

5. Do not use conjunctions as the first word of a sentence.

Conjunctions such as “and”, “but” and “or” are words that are used to connect two dependent clauses to form sentences. Never use it as the first word to start sentences.

6. Break long sentences into a shorter, independent sentences.

If possible, break sentences into shorter fragments.

7. Use speaker labels.

Speaker labels should start with a capital letter followed by a colon and a space afterwards.

Hope that you have learned something from this post!