Literary Dictation and Transcription
What literary dictation tests
The literary leg uses prose - a novel excerpt, an essay, or a technical passage - read at a steady pace, with punctuation, paragraphing, capitalization, and spelling all scored. Literary dictation is often read only once, so the candidate must hold a clause in reserve while writing it and must either catch the reader's punctuation cues ("comma," "quote," "dash," "new paragraph") or mark punctuation from syntax when the reader does not dictate it.
Rules that decide close calls
- Quotation marks: American style places commas and periods inside the closing quote; a question mark or exclamation point goes inside only when the quoted material is itself the question.
- Ellipses mark omitted words; dashes mark interruption. Do not substitute one for the other.
- Hyphenate a compound modifier before a noun ("a well-known author") but not after ("the author is well known").
- Paragraph when the reader says so, and also when the text signals a new speaker or a shift of topic.
Worked example
Dictation: "He said, quote, I never signed it, unquote, and walked out." Output: He said, "I never signed it," and walked out. Reasoning: the comma after said introduces the quotation; the period belongs to the whole sentence, so it follows the closing quotation mark; the comma signaled by unquote moves inside the closing quote under American convention; and walked out stays lower case because the sentence continues.
Traps
Putting the period outside a closing quote; confusing its with it's; "fixing" a split infinitive, which is not an error; capitalizing a word after a semicolon; and paragraphing only when the reader audibly pauses.