How does everybody here deal with contractions? I am interested in 1916 Gregg Shorthand and verbatim reporting.
What I understand, in non-broadcast captioning, machine stenographers do distinguish between contractions and non-contracted versions.
In broadcast captioning an element of paraphrasing does occur.
In court reporting, there is some grammar correction of the transcript.
In parliamentary reporting, there is also editing of the transcript for grammar and style.
In my own Gregg, at the moment I write -nt for contracted forms. I have not really settled on outlines for “gonna”, “wanna” etc.
What does everybody else do, and what was done during the early days, when Gregg shorthand was used for verbatim reporting? Were “verbatim reports” as verbatim as we would nowadays expect? Or would there be some correction of the English for grammar and style?
Can you give an example? Do you mean how to distinguish between "was not" and "wasn't" for example? In general, if the outlines for the contracted and full forms are the same, you put an apostrophe on top of the contracted outline.
That’s what I have done when I want to write a contraction.
For example: "I did not" = "a-dt-e-n" "I didn't" = "a-dt-e-nt"
"I could not" = "a-c-d-n" "I couldn't" = "a-c-d-nt"
"I had not" = "i-d-n" "I hadn't" ="i-d-nt"
Yes, that's correct, except that you don't need the e circle in "didn't."
I'm still thinking about what is the best way to write "gonna" and "wanna" though. At the moment, I'm writing "wanna" as "u-a-n" and "gonna" as "g-n-a". Any other suggestions for better outlines? Especially as "wanna" is difficult to phrase.
I thought about "a-n-a", so that I could do "i-na" as "I wanna", but then its got problems connecting on the right hand side – "I wanna say" = ?
I would write both "gonna" and "wanna" with the a circle at the end. I'm not sure what's the difficulty in connecting the right side of "I wanna say": a – n – a – left s – a.