Perfecting Your Transcripts

How to Get My Help

Schedule. I work seven days a week, so I am nearly always available to help.

Format. Please send fully scoped transcripts in PDF format (not ASCII or .txt files). I will return a pdf file including all of the pages which need revisions; annotations will be marked in red and problem areas which require your review will be highlighted in yellow. If you don’t have a PDF printer function installed yet, there is a free one at www.CutePDF.com that works on Windows systems.

Turnaround time and rates. Please specify which turnaround time you'd prefer when sending a job. Regular turnaround is two business days or 48 hours from confirmation of receipt. Page rates for regular turnaround is $0.70 per page. Rush/expedite turnaround is always ASAP and is billed at $0.90 per page. Please let me know ASAP if you have a rush order. If your rush is longer than 50 pages, please send it in “chunks.” Jobs with very frequent errors may be billed at a higher page rate due to the extra time required.

Communication. I will always respond to confirm receipt of your transcript. If you have not received a confirmation email, please call or text me at (713) 398-3150. Please let me know in advance if a longer job (north of 150 pages) is coming down the pipeline. If you have communicated that you'll be sending a rush but for some reason cannot send it, please keep me informed as to when I can expect it.

Invoicing. Invoices go out at the end of each month. Please remit payment within 30 days of receipt.

As a court recorder you daily face the challenge of reverse engineering a staged play. Perhaps you have seen a nervous young group of actors performing some Shakespeare—rushing through their lines and muddying the meanings of those lines. If you have seen some great performances of Shakespeare, you must have noticed how the actors controlled their pauses in such a way as to create the illusion of suddenly having come up with a thought which then develops into words and actions.

Asides, appositions, parenthetical expressions, sudden shiftings of gears, false starts, stammers—all and more require proper punctuation to successfully allow a reader to recreate the performance in his own mind. Irony, metaphor, ambiguity, mistaken word choices, all must be recorded to allow for their recreation.

Hopefully, by the time your transcript gets to me, you have succeeded in capturing 99% of the words spoken. I will mark up your first draft in red annotations and yellow highlights. Besides the simple proofreading tasks of checking spelling, facts, citations, etc., it is my job to identify every issue which must be corrected in order for you to turn your first draft into a perfected script so that actors (or lawyers and juries) could successfully recreate the original conversation from the transcript alone. Success thereby leads to happy clients!