ORAL HISTORY LESSON PLAN

VIII. Editing Your Transcript

Once you have your full transcript typed up, you’ve completed the hardest part of the Oral History Project.  The next steps are fun; you get to select the best parts of your interview for a narrative (like a story told from your interviewee’s point of view), craft them into paragraphs so your interviewee’s story reads well, pick a title and write a description of your interviewee.  Then all the oral histories will go into a book that you and your interviewee can keep.  Here are the first steps you will follow:

Creating a narrative
Step 1: Selecting the “stories”
Get your transcript and a YELLOW highlighter (other people who read your transcript will use a different color).  Now, read through the transcript.  Highlight phrases and sentences (and whole sections, if it makes sense) that your interviewee said that you want to include in the oral history.  You won’t highlight any of your questions – we’re concentrating only on the stories told by your interviewee.  You should pick the best “stories” plus ideas, information and words that you need to put those stories in context.  You can skip some “umms”, repeated words or phrases, words or phrases you don’t think are important, and whole sections you don’t think are as interesting.

Step 2: Get another opinion
Give your transcript to an adult editor.  He or she will read your transcript and make selections with a highlighter, like you did (but not in yellow).  If possible, sit next to the adult editor while he/she works on your transcript, so you can have a conversation about the selections you both make.

Step 3: Comparing edits
Compare what you highlighted and what the adult editor highlighted.  If he or she highlighted some things you didn’t and you like those additions, make changes on your transcript with your yellow highlighter.  If you don’t want to include something, just cross it out.  Now you have made your selections.

Proofreading and clarifying your transcript
Step 4: Proofreading
Turn in your highlighter.  Now, read through the highlighted parts of your transcript.  Are there any punctuation or spelling errors you see that had to do with your typing (not with the words the interviewee said)?  If so, fix them with a pen or pencil.  Do you see some places where you should put their ideas into a new paragraph?  If so, mark them.  If your interviewee used language that’s not standard English, do not change that; we want the oral histories to read as if the person were talking.  You should, however, represent what he/she said in the most accurate way. 

Step 5: Clarifying
Read the highlighted parts. You may find that they wouldn’t make sense without some information from your question.  On your oral history, you can add some words from your questions to make your interviewee’s answers clear, as long as you add these words in brackets [ ].  Here’s an example:

RB: Where did you originally come from?
TP: Lake Providence, Louisiana. 

For this to make sense without the question, you’d have to add some words like:

[I  came from] Lake Providence, Louisiana.