Transcribing Printed Errors and a Line-End Hyphen
You are transcribing a printed passage in the transcription section. The instructions on the paper say: 'Type exactly what is printed, including any errors in spelling and punctuation. Do not correct the copy.' The passage contains this sentence: 'The committee waited untill Friday, and the govern-ment offices remained closed.' The word 'untill' is printed with two l's. The word 'govern-ment' is split at the end of a printed line, with a hyphen. Later the passage has 'the President' with a capital P, and '10 A.M.' with periods and capitals. You have typed the first two lines and are about to reach these items. You have 8 minutes left and the passage has about 90 words remaining. You are unsure whether to reproduce the line-end hyphen and whether the capital P is a printing error.
1. State exactly how you would type 'untill', 'govern-ment', 'the President', and '10 A.M.', and give your reason for each.
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'untill' - type it as printed, with two ls: untill. The instruction says to include errors in spelling and not to correct the copy. Changing it to until would be a correction, and in a transcription test fidelity to the copy is the skill being tested.
'govern-ment' - type government as one word without a hyphen. The hyphen shown is at the end of a printed line, so it is a line-break artifact used to justify the text, not a hyphen that belongs to the word. Reproducing it would create a false hyphenated form. The test is: would the hyphen still be there if the same word appeared in the middle of a printed line? Here, no.
'the President' - keep the capital P: the President. Capitalisation is part of the copy. You may suspect it is inconsistent, but the instruction does not authorise you to normalise it. If the passage elsewhere uses lower-case president, that is the printed copy's inconsistency, not yours to fix.
'10 A.M.' - type the capitals and periods exactly: 10 A.M. Do not convert it to 10 am or 10 a.m. The same fidelity rule applies.
2. The candidate next to you says the line-end hyphen should be kept because the instruction says 'exactly what is printed'. How do you resolve this conflict?
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The conflict is between a literal reading of 'exactly' and the purpose of transcription. A printed line-end hyphen is a typesetting device: the compositor broke a long word to make the right margin even. It is not punctuation chosen by the author, and it would not appear if the word fell in the middle of a line. Treating it as part of the word changes government into a hyphenated form, which is less faithful to the text than joining the word.
The practical resolution is to ask: is this hyphen a property of the word or a property of the line break? If the same word is hyphenated in the middle of a line, or if the passage consistently prints it with a hyphen, reproduce it. If it appears only at a line end, join the word. The instruction's phrase 'including any errors' is aimed at spelling and punctuation in the text, not at reproducing the justification of the printed page. If the exam paper itself explicitly says 'reproduce line-end hyphens', then follow that specific instruction; without it, join the word. This reasoning also protects you from a second error: typing govern- at the end of your own line and then ment on the next line would create a visible false hyphen.