The one bright spot of doing all these transcriptions is that one interview was held with a professor who had a British accent. That made me just a little bit happier. I can't help it. He's saying his words all funny and rounding his vowels and saying pro-cess instead of prah-cess. He also had the stereotypical British dentistry, I noticed, which amused me at the time, but he was perfectly nice and very well-spoken.
You know how you listen to someone speak an accent, and then you just keep thinking that accent in your head? I'm typing this with a British accent right now.
But it was really very cute. I was interviewing him on the prosthetic non-profit, because he had been with them since the beginning. He described the founder, coming into his office as a young sophomore, as a naive, charming young man who truly looked like he could have been in middle school. But he was honest, enthusiastic. "You couldn't help but want to help," he said.
The other interview was with a very conversational vice president of the prosthetic non-profit. We never really realize how ridiculously long-winded we sound until we have to type every word that comes out of people's mouths. Sentences are run-on to the extreme, and sometimes don't even make grammatical sense. It never occurred to me while I was interviewing him. But while I was typing out his words, long strings of words where the sentence has 7 independent clauses and some fragments and starts of sentences that stop when he changes his mind and flow abruptly into a new sentence, it just suddenly struck me how natural it sounds when you hear it and how awkward it sounds when it's read.
It'd make a very interesting book to have the characters talk like we do in real life.
It also leads to a great amount of paraphrasing in transcription. Whenever you see a quote in an article somewhere, realize that it's an edited version of the exact words they said. But if we all published exact words all the time, we'd end up with a lot of "um's", "ah's", "you know's", "it's kinda like's", and "I mean's".
"And using all of that, all that can come together to bring us from, like I said, the first prototype to the first viable product, and I mean that's pretty much a summary of how, just what we're trying to do."
"But Jon is there to facilitate what this grant is actually about in terms of putting arms on people, and watching them for a period of time, and seeing how their skin behaves, how they behave, what they can use it for, how the device stands up to the wear and tear, is it easy to understand how to use, because that’s a big thing for us too, is the average person needs to be able to figure out how to use the device, because it can’t be something that’s so complicated or unintuitive that they have a hard time using it."
So I add a few periods and subtract a few conversational transit words. It never changes the meaning. But I can see how it might be a slippery slope--that's why we always email our final drafts to the subjects, in case they want to change any of their quotes. A good system, I think, and the subjects have always seemed to appreciate it. They always make similar changes, making it sound smoother and more professional.
Sounding just as professional in conversation as in writing is much harder than it sounds.
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