constructing the "feel of a conversation":

the logistics (and politics) of

transcription and editing

Who does the transcription? How does the editing proceed?

 

Wade MahonIn the past it went to the lead person, but in recent years, we’ve started to useslave labor” to do that, actually. We have an intern every semester who works with us for independent study credit, and we used to have to do the long transcription of the interviews. Usually if they don’t do it, it’ll fall either to me or to him to do that part. So we usually have the interviewer or the intern take the transcript and go through it. They transcribe more or less verbatim. We tell them not to worry about theums” andahs” and every little detail.

Then once we have a long transcript, one or both of us, will try for a balance between the written text and something that sounds like a conversation. We edit the raw transcript and try to take material out, cut off the rough edges so it doesn’t embarrass the speaker (and so readers aren’t going to think people with Ph.D.s can’t construct a grammatical sentence). When you look at the way you speak in a transcript, it makes you look pretty bad. But we clean it up. We still try to maintain the feel of a conversation, the feel of speech. For instance, we normally don’t use contractions, but for the interview we’ll use contractions. We’re more flexible on punctuation and things like that. We give it kind of a conversational flair, but I think it’s kind of a balance.

Eric Schroeder: The answer to this question depends a lot on the subject. I mentioned one of my subjects was Tim O’Brien. O’Brien not only speaks in beautifully manicured sentences, he speaks in paragraphs. When you’re transcribing Tim O’Brien, you get an intuitive feeling,Okay, here the paragraph break is coming up.” It was wonderful to transcribe because he almost never misspeaks and everything is coherent and you don’t need to move anything around. When I did that interview, almost nothing got touched. It’s almost all Tim O’Brien’s speech, but that’s rare. 

At the other end of the spectrum was John Sack. I had to cut and paste like mad, moving stuff around. He does something I’ve noticed I’ve been doing in the course of this interview. He’ll start a sentence and half way through it, something else will pop up, and he’ll do that sentence and then go back and finish the first one. You’ve got to extract the middle one and decide where it goes. Does it actually come before or does it go after? Or does it go in a different paragraph? If you tried to transcribe that as it was spoken, it doesn’t fit into our reading conventions. It’s a convention of speech, but not of writing.

So the organization of the edited transcript departs from the structure of the live interview? 

You rearrange parts of an interviewee’s responses to centralize some of the ideas?

 

Wade MahonActually, I think I’ve done that once. Maybe it was the first one, where I was trying to connect something to make it adequate. It was probably more along the lines of following one question and the person’s response from end to beginning, or vice versa. But most of the time, the changes are within a given response. I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe it seemed to me that for a reader who is trying to keep different topics together, it seemed sensible to combine. Maybe it’s the way we’ve structured the order of the questions that we ask. To a certain extent you’re creating a seamless conversation in which both sides are very eloquent and well spoken, with a great command of their language.

Eric Schroeder: What I’m doing is more literary than anything. There are artifacts that I leave in because I want it to seem like a conversation or give the illusion of being a conversation when it really is literary. There are certain things that I’ll leave in that are clearly bits of speech, so it will have that flow to it. The larger flow I think is a kind of constructed literary text where you’re trying to have coherent paragraphs and to go one topic to another one smoothly. For instance, if I’m talking to somebody about how he got started as a writer and three quarters of the way through the interview we’re on something completely different and he says, Which reminds me of something about when I first got started,” I will always go back and cut that and put it back in the front to make that coherent.

There are some interview subjects (and readers) who really would like to see that raw transcript, warts and all, but it’s an impossible read and takes up enormous print space. 

Where do you draw the line? At what point do you say, “We can’t do that”?

Wade MahonWell, that’s a good question. Transcribing is kind of a subjective process. We want to stay true to what the interviewees are saying and not misrepresent their words or put things in their mouth, or make them sound totally different than they did in person. But we do make revisions. First of all, we usually cut out theums” and theahs,” and places where people start over again in the middle of a sentence, unless it’s something that might be useful to keep. A lot of times people will start out a sentence in one grammatical category and end up in something totally different—the kind of thing we would circle on our students’ papers and tell them to fix. So we try to address things like that and shape up the grammar a little bit. We decide where the punctuation goes, and where the paragraphs begin and end. That’s always a judgment call. I don’t know whether you need to identify—you’d have to do that one way or another, probably, no matter how literal you’re going to be.

But one of the things that’s been interesting about doing the transcribing from the long form to the print form is the difference between spoken language and written language. The different ways that people signal changes in their topics and their ideas, and the way they connect things verbally, are very different from what they would do in print. Some examples of that would belike” andand.” One of the things I’ve noticed about a lot of different interviewees is that they tend to rely onand” as the key transition device between topics. You ask them a question, and they have a five-part answer to that question. They signal the differences, their transitions, withand.” They’ll say,Well, the first thing I’d like to say is” blah, blah, blah, blah,and another issue is,” blah, blah, blah, blah,and. . . .” You can hear it more than you can see it, if you’re just looking for it on the page.

I should be careful about talking about this. Often, people will tend to wrap up what they’ve been saying by introducing a sentence withSo. . . .”So the most important thing here. . . .” That’s kind of a key that you see a lot of times—you best be prepared to start a new paragraph, to go on to something else. 

Eric Schroeder: I wish I had come to some great insight like,We do this or that,” but not really. You never can predict who will talk like what because writers are a much more diverse group. Sometimes you get people who are brilliant speakers and they do not require any changes. Then I’m thinking of an interview we published some years ago with Art Spiegelman done by a graduate student. It was pretty incoherent. I really had to work on a sentence level to clean them up. Even as speech it was hard to follow, and the graduate student who had originally done it just hadn’t cleaned it at all. She essentially gave us a transcript—it was pretty rough. 

The composition people in general are more coherent as a group. They think about what they say and how to phrase it. Sometimes they tend to speak theory which can be dense, and you have to wade through it a little bit.

I want to be fair to people, and I don’t want them to feel they have been misrepresented. I understand how important somebody’s voice is, and it is the last thing I want to screw up. Occasionally people will change material that we really love and it breaks our hearts. They will say terribly snide things about their so-called colleagues who may be more of their adversaries than their colleagues. We show it to them and they’re horrified at what they said and want it removed. We’ll say, Oh, we wanted that to stay in," but we always respect their wishes. Most of the time they make decisions for the better.

I always love it when they add something that wasn’t clear. Usually, most subjects make the interview even better by tweaking it. It’s rare that anybody tweaks it and it becomes a mess. Then we just don’t proceed with it. If it is somebody that we really wanted for an interview, then I have to make a hard decision. How much can I work with this to try to save it? Do we just have to say no, it really does not work?

We get lots of stuff just sent in cold from graduate students around the country because so-and-so happened to be at their university and they got to interview them. They think we’ll want to publish it, and in some cases we have wanted to publish it because it’s a person we’re interested in and the interview was good. In other cases, it turns out to be something so specific to that student’s dissertation that it really didn’t fit in to what we are trying to do. 

The interviewer’s worst nightmare?

e d i t o r s'  n o t e

b a c k g r o u n d s

e a r l y  i n t e r e s t s

s u p p o r t

j o u r n a l s

n u t s  &  b o l t s

r e c e n t
  &  f o r t h c o m i n g

l o c a t i n g  s u b j e c t s

c o u r t s h i p

q u e s t i o n i n g
  &  c o l l a b o r a t i n g

t r a n s c r i p t s
  &  e d i t i n g

e t h i c s  &  v o i c e

g e n r e  &  m e t h o d

r h e t o r i c
  &  c o m p o s i t i o n

c o m m u n i t y

Wade MahonYes, it’sWe’re not going to let you do this.” I know that kind of thing has happened in the past for some people, but at least since I’ve been with the journal, we haven’t run into that problem. Maybe we haven’t asked sensitive enough questions to get into trouble like that. So far we’ve been pretty lucky. 

When I recall feedback that we’ve gotten from interviewees, people are positive and appreciate talking with us, and aren’t overly concerned about the exact wording of things. And actually, most of the time they’re very happy for us to make comments to that effect. They’re happy we clean things up a little bit.

Eric Schroeder: I am obsessive about my technology because I did have one bad experience. I once interviewed James Webb, who was Secretary of the Navy and Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. He wrote three novels on the Vietnam War, one of which was a big popular success. His politics are very different than mine, but he represented a political point of view that I didn’t have in my book and he agreed to be interviewed. I went to Washington and interviewed him. When I got back to my hotel room, I went to play the interview and it was blank. That’s my interviewing nightmare story. 

I contacted him and said I’d be happy to come back at my own expense and interview him again and never heard from him. He really blew me off. I really regret it because he ended up giving me a great interview. He didn’t end up changing my mind, but he was extremely articulate and he had a point of view that I thought should be represented. 

Now when I teach interviewing skills to students, I belabor what is often to them the obvious about the technology. Try it before you do it and make sure your batteries are fresh and all those kinds of things. 

I always have two tape players now running—a regular sized cassette and a micro that I use.

Cross-Conversations on Writing, Interviewing, and Editing:
A Meta-Interview with Wade Mahon & Eric Schroeder

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 10.1 (2005)
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/10.1/