English Grammar, Punctuation, and Usage
Verbatim, but not careless
Transcripts preserve the speaker's grammar; the reporter's own apparatus - parentheticals, index entries, certificates, titles - must be flawless. The exam grades both: it shows a witness's nonstandard sentence and expects it unchanged, then shows a sloppy parenthetical and expects a correction.
Points of style the exam tests
- Speaker designations in full caps followed by a colon (THE COURT:, MR. HALL:), with Q. and A. carrying periods and nothing else.
- Commas and periods inside closing quotation marks; a question mark goes inside only when the quotation is the question. "Did he say, 'I'm leaving'?" puts the question mark outside because the whole sentence asks.
- Serial comma: pick one convention and hold it through the document.
- Numbers: spell out one through ten in ordinary prose, use figures for dates, times, money, and measurements, and stay consistent within a sentence.
- Capitalize Your Honor in direct address and Court when it designates the presiding judge.
Worked example
A witness says: "he dont want no lawyer." Output: Q. What did you tell the officer? A. I told him he dont want no lawyer. Reasoning: the grammar is the evidence; cleaning it up changes what the jury and the appellate court see. The parenthetical or certificate around it, however, is edited to standard English.
Traps
Silently correcting a witness; placing a period outside a quotation mark; mixing its and it's; using a semicolon where a colon introduces a list; hyphenating a compound modifier after the noun.