ABSTRACT
The spoken word can very easily be mutilated when it is taken down in writing and transferred to the printed page. Some distortion is bound to arise, whatever the intention of the writer, simply by cutting out pauses and repetitions-a concession which writers very generally feel bound to make in the interests of readability. In the process, weight and balance can easily be upset. A much more serious distortion arises when the spoken word is boxed into the categories of written prose. The imposition of grammatical forms, when it is attempted, creates its own rhythms and cadences, and they have little in common with those of the human tongue. People do not usually speak in paragraphs, and what they have to say does not usually follow an ordered sequence of comma, semi-colon, and full stop; yet very often this is the way in which their speech is reproduced. Continuity, and the effort to impose it even when it violates the twists and turns of speech, is another insidious influence. Questioning itself, however sympathetic, produces its own forced sequences, and the editing of a transcript is almost bound to reinforce this. The writer has his own purposes, and these may be only coincidentally those of his informant; irrelevance (as it appears to the writer) may be patiently listened to, but be given short shrift when he comes to single out passages to reproduce. Then, all kinds of rearrangement may seem to be called for, if the illusion of continuity is to be preserved. The writer may even resort to changing the order of speech, since comparatively few people will speak to a single point at a time (indeed the better the interview, the less likely they are to do so); nor will they always say all the things that they have to say on a subject at one go. The decadence of transcription may become extreme if the writer, not content with mutilating a text, by cuts and rearrangements, then attempts to weave it together again with interpolated words of his own. Thus, the very process by which speech is made to sound consecutive is also bound, in some degree, to violate its original integrity, though the degree to which it does so will depend upon how far the writer is aware of the temptations to which he is prone.
