Transcription Conventions
Agreed rules for turning recorded speech into written text, specifying how to represent pauses, overlaps, emphasis, and nonverbal sounds.
Transcription conventions are the rules a researcher follows when converting recorded speech into written text. They specify how to represent features such as pauses, overlapping talk, laughter, emphasis, unclear words, and omitted or anonymized material. Conventions range from simple verbatim rules for thematic work to detailed notation systems used in conversation and discourse analysis, where timing and delivery are themselves data.
In a thesis, stating your conventions matters because transcription is an interpretive step, not a neutral one: what you leave out limits what you can analyze. Choose a level of detail matched to your method, include a key to your symbols in an appendix, and apply the conventions consistently so quotations in your findings chapters are accurate and comparable.
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