Literary Dictation and Transcription
What the test measures
Literary dictation uses continuous, edited prose - an essay, article, or short story - read aloud at a steady pace. It tests the opposite skill from testimony: you must supply the punctuation, paragraphing, and capitalization the reader never announces. Candidates must sustain speed without losing semantic sense, because meaning, not breath pauses, drives the marks. Know how to handle nonrestrictive phrases (paired commas), introductory clauses, semicolons joining independent clauses, colons before lists, dashes for interruption, quotation marks around titles and quoted speech, hyphenated compounds, and numbers.
Homophones are frequent traps: its/it's, their/there/they're, principal/principle, counsel/council, complement/compliment, cite/site/sight. So are proper nouns caught on the fly and capitalization questions such as "the South" versus "southern," or "President" versus "president."
The classic trap is a pause that is rhetorical rather than grammatical - a reader pausing for emphasis does not warrant a comma. The opposite trap is punctuating from memory of the passage rather than from the words actually read.
Rule of thumb: at the end of each paragraph, read the sentence back silently. If the punctuation makes the sentence say something different from what was read, the mark is wrong.
Worked example: "The committee's report, which was released on Tuesday, was not well received." The "which" clause is nonrestrictive - it could be lifted out without changing which report is meant - so it takes paired commas. Had the reader said "that was released on Tuesday," the clause would be restrictive and take no commas.