It’s been so, so difficult to find info about speed vs. how quickly new transcribers will be able to complete a job, and *why* it might take that long. So thank you for clearing that up for me. Now I don’t feel terribly slow, and I know that although I’m still very new to this (I mean very VERY new), I’m right on target as far as the time it takes to complete the job (including proofing, which I hadn’t known that it was okay to consider when calculating my personal “time it takes to complete a job”).

And yes, like your first commenter there said, it’s absolutely imperative to use a program (i.e., MS Word’s “autocorrect” feature) to replace those abbreviations for us as we type–both with familiar ones like “tv” as he listed above, AND on those that pertain specifically to phrases that keep being repeated within that audio file, for that specific job (i.e., company names, book titles, etc.).

Thanks again for your help!

You can do this by learning typing shorthand.

Think of ‘tv’ (2 characters) for example. We all know that the full English word for that is ‘television’ (10 characters). Now anyone who would read ‘tv’ would automatically know that what is being referred to is in fact ‘television’. How about we look at an abbreviation that may be less widely recognized like ‘IBM’ for example? That abbreviation actually stands for ‘International Business Machines’ (in case you didn’t know). A three (3) character abbreviation (IBM) is used to replace thirty-three (33) characters. That’s a 92% savings.

With shorthand typing, it’s possible to uniquely identify words and phrases that we all type on a regular basis and develop shorthand abbreviations for them. Then we can type the abbreviations and have a software program automatically replace the abbreviations with the expanded words/phrases that they represent. Correctly spelled and capitalized. This will save a significant number of keystrokes and time.

I would like to invite you to check out my website (www.typeless.biz) and see how it’s possible to actually do LESS typing and to produce more output in less time. Also, you can lessen the likelihood of ever developing Carpal Tunnel Syndrome which can put ALL of you typing out of commission for a long time.

Thanks