Your Knot Gona Belief This

YOUR KNOT GONA BELIEF THIS

Yes, sometimes that is what can happen on the above statement when you do not check your work and proofread what you’re about to turn in.  We are all human, but these are the kind of errors that one might see on a transcript from a student or a new reporter, believe it or not.

Sure, we are all trained to write these words differently, but there are still those times, because we are human, that we make little mistakes like the one above.

The point that should be made here is that if we were to see this go out and later be called on it, it would be rather embarrassing for us.  Not only for the one that actually sent it out, but for the profession in general.  It would appear that we do not know what in the world we are doing or one might ask if we were actually trained in the grammar field or trained in the English language.

There are several “catch words,” as I like to call them, that students and newbies should look for.  Ones that I find particularly troublesome are:

Your/you’re

Its/It’s

Believe/belief

there/their/they’re

a/an

right/write

Now, the above examples are only a very short list of the many words that can throw a sentence off.  One above that particularly annoys me is “its” and “it’s.”  I’ve yet to see “it’s” possess anything, but this is one word that is probably misused more in the English language than any other word I’ve seen.  “Its going to be a nice day.”  Or, “That dog sure is taking it’s time to cross the road.”  Or, “The machine, at it’s best, is perfect.”  You get the picture.

Of course, the other one that drives all of the seasoned reporters crazy when they are reading papers and the like would be “your” and “you’re.”  Those are misused in so many instances that the list is too long to even give examples of.

One other grammar area that I would like to discuss is when an attorney asks a question and the witness will answer the question with a “yes” or a “no” and then will add more to the answer that may not be responsive to the original question.

For instance, “Q.  Did you go home last night?”

“A.  Yes, I went to the store first.”

Now, that example above could possibly read that way, but I really don’t think the answer “yes” should have the rest of that statement tied in with it.  Chances are, there might have even been a pause between the “yes” and the rest of the answer.

A lot of us have our software set up, perhaps, to just automatically put a comma after the “yes” or the “no” and we may not even catch these examples.  But, I would say that cleary this is an example where proofing should have caught this, if nothing else.

I think the bottom line for students and new court reporters in the field is this:  Yes, someone actually does read your transcript after you’ve finished it.  Yes, they will probably see little errors like the ones I’ve mentioned above.  Yes, those areas mentioned above could clearly have been caught during the editing process as well as the proofing process to save embarrassment later on.

So, in short, take pride in your work, whether you’re still in school or just getting started in the field.  Remember that you are part of a profession that has a very important job and those before us have worked long and hard to make it what it is.  Let’s continue to keep this profession a respected profession and take pride in what we do.

Otherwsie, we aer knot gonig to last long and, belief mee, known of us won’t that to hapen yet.

This entry was posted on 3. March 2010 at 10:37 and is filed under Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.