Rendering a Witness Who Talks Like a Witness
You are editing a personal-injury deposition transcript. The witness's key answer reads, in your rough notes, as follows: 'So I told him-I said, look, if the invoice was, you know, less than what she said, I mean, we would of paid it. And he goes, quote, that's not my problem, unquote, and hung up.' At another point the witness trails off: 'I figured somebody would...' and is then cut off by objections. Counsel's office later emails that the witness 'sounds uneducated' and asks you to 'clean it up so it reads properly,' to convert the spoken word 'quote-unquote' into actual quotation marks, and to delete 'you know' and 'I mean' throughout. A partner also asks you to add [sic] after 'would of.'
1. Punctuate and render the passage. Explain your choices for the false start, the self-correction, and the trailing off.
Read the worked answer
A defensible rendering:
So I told him-I said, look, if the invoice was, you know, less than what she said, I mean, we would of paid it. And he goes, quote, that's not my problem, unquote, and hung up.
And for the second passage:
I figured somebody would-
Reasoning.
- False start / self-correction ('I told him-I said'): an em dash marks the abandoned start cleanly and preserves the fact that two attempts were made. A comma would understate the restart.
- Trailing off versus being cut off: a speaker who simply stops gets an ellipsis; a speaker who is interrupted by an objection, a phone, or another speaker gets a dash. The second passage is an interruption, so the dash is correct and the ellipsis would be wrong.
- 'you know' and 'I mean': these are part of what was said. Deleting them alters the record and, in a credibility contest, deletes exactly the texture a reader is entitled to see.
- Consistency matters more than house preference. Whatever your style guide says about dash spacing and ellipsis form, apply it uniformly so the transcript reads as one document.
2. How do you punctuate a speaker's spoken 'quote...unquote,' and should you add [sic] after 'would of'?
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Spoken 'quote/unquote.' The witness said the words. Converting them into quotation marks destroys the information that the speaker verbally flagged a quotation, which is often exactly what counsel is probing about on the next page. Transcribe them as spoken words, set off by commas, and be consistent throughout the job. If your firm's style converts to quotation marks, that is a stylistic election that should be applied uniformly and disclosed - not a decision made sentence by sentence.
[sic]. No. [sic] is not a spell-check flag; it is an editorial signal that the reporter has noticed an error and is disclaiming it. Reserve it for cases where a reader would otherwise think the reporter erred: misspelled proper names, garbled citations to published text being read into the record, or a technical term rendered oddly. Ordinary informal grammar, regional usage, and dialect are not reporter errors and need no disclaimer. Sprinkling [sic] through a witness's testimony is an editorial act that shifts how the transcript reads and can be characterized as commentary on the witness.
Do not 'clean it up.' 'Would of' stays. So do the fillers. The correct answer to counsel is a courteous no with an offer: if counsel wants an edited narrative for internal use, that is a separate, clearly labeled work product - never the certified transcript.
3. The witness is a speaker of a non-standard dialect, and the requesting attorney says the transcript 'makes him look bad.' How does that change your analysis, if at all?
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It sharpens it rather than changing it.
- Dialect is not error. Features of a regional or ethnic dialect - habitual 'be,' multiple negation, consonant deletion - are rule-governed grammar, not mistakes. They are transcribed in standard orthography as the words the speaker used. Writing phonetically ('axed,' 'bidness') caricatures the speaker and is a recognized professional failure.
- Do not 'translate' upward either. Rendering dialect into standard English is as much a falsification as mocking it.
- The complaint is itself information. A request to make a witness 'look bad' less is a request to alter the record for a strategic purpose, and the answer is the same no, delivered in writing, without heat.
- Practical remedy that is legitimate: an errata sheet or read-and-sign procedure, where the witness - not counsel, not the reporter - corrects the witness's own answers. That is the mechanism the rules provide, and it keeps the reporter out of the middle.