Literary Dictation: Dialect and the Semicolon List
You are taking a 180 wpm literary dictation exercise for certification. The recorded voice reads a passage from a modern novel set in the Mississippi Delta. The passage includes the line: “She said, ‘I ain’t gwine tell you nothing, and that’s all-’ then stopped.” The same passage contains a list: “He packed a compass; a dented canteen; three pencils, two of them broken; and a map.” The reader does not pause at semicolons and will not repeat the recording. Your realtime output is scored for verbatim accuracy, including punctuation and capitalization. You have a steno dictionary with standard English but no entries for dialect spellings. The recording runs at a steady 180 wpm, but the list is delivered at about 200 wpm for four seconds. You must keep the feed live; there is no editing window. The scoring rubric penalizes both omitted words and normalized dialect, but it also penalizes a stall of more than two seconds.
1. How do you render “I ain’t gwine tell you nothing” in a verbatim literary feed? Should you normalize the dialect to “I am not going to tell you anything”? Why or why not?
Read the worked answer
I would not normalize it. The passage is literary dialogue, and the dialect is part of the author’s characterization and voice. Verbatim accuracy means preserving “I ain’t gwine tell you nothing” as spoken, including the apostrophe in “ain’t” and the dialect form “gwine.” Normalizing to “I am not going to tell you anything” would change the register, erase the character’s speech pattern, and violate the verbatim requirement even though the proposition is the same. If my steno dictionary lacks “gwine,” I would fingerspell it or create a brief before the exercise; in the moment, I would not substitute “going” just because it is easier. I would also preserve the dash inside the quotation because it signals the interruption before “then stopped.” The key reasoning is that literary dialect is lexical content, not an error to be corrected. The reporter’s job is to capture the author’s text, not to improve its grammar or standardize its spelling.
2. The list “a compass; a dented canteen; three pencils, two of them broken; and a map” is read without pauses. How do you decide punctuation at speed, and what is the risk of using commas instead of semicolons?
Read the worked answer
The semicolons are doing real syntactic work: they separate list items that are themselves complex. In particular, “three pencils, two of them broken” contains an internal comma, so using commas for the whole list would make the boundaries ambiguous. At speed, I would listen for the list structure-item, item, item with an internal comma, final item-and write semicolons as soon as that pattern is audible. The reader’s lack of pause does not authorize a punctuation change; intonation and syntax carry the structure. If my semicolon outline is not automatic, I would still prioritize continuous capture: a comma fallback preserves the words but loses punctuation accuracy, while a stall loses words and punctuation. The better realtime judgment is to use semicolons if the strokes are available and to keep the feed moving if they are not. The risk of commas is not merely stylistic; it can change the meaning of the list and make the transcript look as though “two of them broken” is a separate item rather than a qualifier of “three pencils.”
3. The reader says “three pencils, two of them broken,” but you initially write “two of them were broken.” You realize the error one second later while the reader continues. What do you do in a no-editing realtime environment?
Read the worked answer
I would keep writing forward and not try to rewrite the past. At 180 wpm, one second is roughly three words; a correction that requires backspacing, repositioning, or re-reading the sentence can cost more than the original error and cause a larger gap. The no-editing rule means the live feed stands as the realtime product. If the platform has an instantaneous single-word correction that does not break capture, I might use it only when the next phrase is predictable or the correction is a single stroke; otherwise the safer judgment is to preserve continuity. After the session, if the rules permit a quality log or errata, I would note the discrepancy, but I would not silently alter the official record. The reasoning is that realtime verbatim reporting is a continuous capture task: local perfection is less important than not losing the next several words. The error is small and identifiable; a stall at 180 wpm can produce a much larger omission.