Play It Again – Who Are We?

First published 4/7/08

Who are we? And what makes us qualified to run this blog?

Go ahead. Admit it. We know you were asking yourself that anyway, so we figured we’d just go ahead and get that out of the way to start. When we decided to write this post as our first post, I somehow got nominated to be the one to write it, and now I have to figure out how to do that without sounding like I’m tooting my own horn. I’m counting on you to just give me the benefit of the doubt here, okay?

Let’s see.

Shaina, Tara and I are three transcriptionists (and friends) who work from home. Shaina started out in an office setting but has since transitioned from an employee to an independent contractor working at home. We’ve all been transcribing for almost 3 years now, and we’ve contracted with over ten companies as well as worked for independent clients. We no longer contract with that many companies, primarily working with just two to three of those companies each, but we made the decision to end those relationships, not the other way around.

As I was thinking about what to include in this post, I tried to calculate how many audio hours we’ve transcribed altogether, but some of us (okay, me!) don’t have very detailed records earlier than 2007. I can tell you that a very rough estimate tells me that the number is well above 2,500 audio hours, and right now we’re all working essentially full-time, so that number is increasing rapidly week-by-week.

Along with transcribing, we’ve run subcontracting businesses, been hired to proof other transcriptionists’ work and written training manuals and tests for large companies.

Beyond that, we’re all committed to improving our skills, and we daily look for better ways to go about the mechanics of the business (including macros, text expanders, typing accuracy and grammar, all of which we’ll be posting about). We spend pretty much all day in contact via IM so that we can ask for each other's opinions on grammar and terminology questions.

Out of that constant contact and desire to improve came the idea for this blog. We have no doubt that there are many other skilled transcriptionists out there committed to not only getting faster but also getting better, and as we come across articles, grammar rules and tips that we think will help others, we’ll be posting them here. We’re committed to posting something daily for as long as we can find something worth posting, and we have a feeling that that will be quite a while.

We also hope to provide information to help others know if this is the right industry for them and to help them get started in our Getting Started series. ETA: We have since done this as well as launched our ebook, General Transcription 101: Your Complete Guide to Getting Started!

We hope that you’ll join us, offering us feedback and sharing your tips, as we build a network of professional transcriptionists! Our feed is available for you to subscibe to via your favorite feed reader or e-mail as well!