| Back to Home > Bulletin Board > Media Issues > Topic: Taking notes/shorthand |
Topic: Taking notes/shorthand
| Author | Message |
| jkdscribe | Posted – 9/6/2008 12:10:25 AM | show profile I've recently come to the conclusion that I have become too dependent on my voice recorder. Anyone have any advice for how to get good at taking shorthand notes to keep up with people speaking when a recorder isn't available? Thanks |
| Cyrus | Posted – 9/7/2008 9:47:32 PM | show profile If you do most of your interviews via phone, why not just type them? I was on the journalism side for 10 years before going into PR, and I almost always did that, going back to a time when MicroTeks and other VDTs, rather than actual PCs, were standard in newsrooms. The best thing about it is once you're done, you don't have to worry about transcribing something you no longer can read. Obviously that requires the ability to type pretty quickly, but if you can, it works well. ------ Cyrus Afzali Astoria Communications www.astoriacomm.com |
| cali1296 | Posted – 9/8/2008 1:03:07 AM | show profile It just takes practice, and you have to be a really good listener and you have to be able to type fast. I was a newspaper reporter for eight years before I moved to magazines, and I only taped and interview once, on the first day of my first internship in college. |
| snappiness | Posted – 9/8/2008 8:50:37 AM | show profile When I have an in-person visit scheduled I do my interviews in advance over the phone to get the main info, then my visit is just for "color." It's easier to hand-write quickly when you're just getting color and not the facts and details. I can type so much faster then I can write, pretty much as fast as most people talk. |
| jkdscribe | Posted – 9/8/2008 11:15:38 PM | show profile I always type when I'm on the phone and when I'm doing in-person interviews (which I prefer) I almost always use my recorder because the interviews are so much better when you can have a conversation without trying to get everything down. The only time this is a real hassle is for less important interviews, of which I might have several to later transcribe. I've been getting better with practice, but it's slow progress. |
| razorness | Posted – 10/3/2008 6:01:19 PM | show profile If you type instead of record interviews, what do you provide the editor with? Do editors prefer recordings/tapes? Or can you simply submit your typed notes with your article? |
| consider | Posted – 10/4/2008 8:32:04 PM | show profile Snappiness, I did what you do regularly for the first time for an important story last week. It worked fantastically. That's going to be my method, too, from now on. I've given up trying to "hand-write" notes, especially for quotes. It all looks like garbage I can't read, and I always miss the second half of whatever someone is saying. If I type my notes, I don't miss anything. I type like 80 wpm. |
