What is the "art" of scoping?

Hello again!

So what is the "art" of scoping?  Well, the basics are to clean up any gibberish, which might be untranslated or mistranslated steno, manually type in words heard on audio but absent from the transcript, add missing punctuation, and so forth.  After mastering the basics, the scopist should strive to make the written transcript not only reflective of what was spoken but in a manner that conveys how something was said so that you, the reader, then "gets" what the person was saying.  An example might be something like this:

A.  Well, yes, I went down there to my mom's house that day.  And I saw a red car parked in the driveway.  But I wasn't really paying much attention at the time.  I was just there to see how my grandfather was getting along, since he's old now and on a lot of meds and all.  And so my focus was not really on what was in the driveway.  Or, for that matter, what was even parked on the street either.  I was just there for a few minutes really, talking with my mom and my grandfather.

Well, one scopist might think that looks just fine and dandy as is.  All the correct words are there to match with the audio, and they might think the punctuation looks good.  Another scopist might take issue with some of the punctuation but still not employ the art of scoping.

So could that answer be tweaked to still have the same words but be easier for the reader to understand what the witness was saying?  Yes.  That's where the "art" comes into play.  It could be changed to something like this:

A.  Well, yes, I went down there to my mom's house that day, and I saw a red car parked in the driveway.
      But I wasn't really paying much attention at the time -- I was just there to see how my grandfather was getting along since he's old now and on a lot of meds and all -- and so my focus was not really on what was in the driveway or, for that matter, what was even parked on the street either.
       I was just there for a few minutes, really, talking with my mom and my grandfather.

See how the middle portion is all one long thought (the person wasn't paying attention and didn't notice what was parked where)?  As the witness was answering, they just sort of threw in the part about being there to check on grandpa, so that's why it should be dashed-off because if you lifted it out of the sentence, it would then read:  "But I wasn't really paying much attention at the time, and so my focus was not really on what was in the driveway or, for that matter, what was even parked on the street either."

Taking a few moments to read back through each person's spoken words and do a little punctuation tweaking so that the testimony flows smoothly is how it's done and why it is called the "art of scoping."

Until next time ...