ABSTRACT
Far from being an objective and exhaustive mirroring of events of an interaction, a transcript is fundamentally selective and interpretive. The transcriber is constantly making choices concerning what information to include, what descriptive categories to use (e.g. what length pause constitutes a ‘short’ pause), which aspects of the interaction are interrelated and which are the most important, and how to express all of this within the limits of the graphemic/spatial medium of the transcript. If well chosen for the researcher’s goals and theoretical orientation, a transcript can greatly help in finding regularities of interest free from the distraction of irrelevant detail. If not, it can hinder detection of patterns of interest, and give rise to directly misleading impressions.
