Come Back for Your Inflected Endings

By Kevin and Mary Daniel

One of the skills of good realtime writers is a knowledge of what words are and what words may not be in their dictionaries. During 18 years of court reporting using computer-aided transcription, our dictionaries never exceeded 50,000 entries. In the six years we have been captioning, our dictionaries have more than doubled in size. If you decide to go into captioning, you'll find that the dictionary you built in court and freelance work is woefully lacking in words used in the news every day. In our case, we have over 100,000 entries in our individual dictionaries, entered over a span of 24 years.

In captioning, we usually only get one shot at writing something correctly. If we write it incorrectly, it's too late to fix, and besides, we have to keep up with what is currently being said. Also, in captioning, there is no interaction with the parties speaking. There is no stopping for clarification. There is no opportunity to request that a speaker slow down or speak up. When we hear a word, we have less than a half-second to recognize the word, decide if the word is in our dictionary or must be constructed or fingerspelled, and then write the word. To decrease the likelihood of making a mistake, we use a basic rule: Come back for all your inflected word endings.

That means coming back for every s, 's, es, ed, ing, er, est and so on. While at first it seems this will result in extra strokes for words you now write in one stroke, the long-term benefit is that you will have an instant increase in correct translation and an eventual decrease in hesitation while writing. Once you are automatically coming back for all your word endings, new derivations of the word will not create hesitation in your writing, thereby increasing your overall writing speed. An additional benefit of coming back for all your endings is the hundreds of conflicts that are resolved automatically. The sidebar is just a sampler of conflicts that resolve themselves if you come back for the endings.

With that rule firmly fixed in your theory, you can then make your own exceptions as you see fit. For instance, we write the words balls and strikes often enough in captioning baseball that the plurals are in our dictionary as individual entries. However, we can and often do write the plurals in two strokes. First, it becomes natural to come back for the plurals. Another reason is it gives us another fraction of a second edge when waiting to determine the exact form of a word from context. Consider this portion of a sentence: "All day the strikes ... ." That sentence could end either of two ways: "All day the strikes have been called low" or "All day the strike's been called low." If we're trailing the speaker closely, we can write the root word strike and tack on the correct ending as the context reveals the form of the word intended.

Also, it's often the case that we hear the singular form of a word, but it becomes apparent from the context a word or two later that the plural is the correct form. If we have written the singular form, we only have to add the plural ending, rather than having to delete the incorrect form and rewrite the plural. If you ever intend to apply for a job as a captioner, you will probably be asked to take a test and allow the person hiring you to review your notes. This one writing principle will make you stand out as someone who is serious about becoming a competent realtime writer.

About the Authors:

Kevin and Mary Daniel, both RDR, CRRs, are from McMichael, Pa. This is an excerpt from their book, Writing Naked: Principles of Writing for Realtime and Captioning, which can be purchased from the NCRA Store.

Resolved Conflicts

This is a sample of the conflicts that resolve themselves if you come back for the endings.

bald/balled/balanced
base/bays
clause/claws
coax/Cokes
dies/dyes/dice
fleas/fleece/flees
gored/gourd
hold/holed
hoes/hose
locks/lox
mustard/mustered
pleas/please
praise/prays/preys
raise/rays/raze/ray's
sacks/sax
seas/seize/sees/cease
spade/spayed
tacks/tax
wind/wined