Verbatim vs. clean: how much to keep

This is Talk Type, from the team at Pepys, where we turn talk into text.

Every transcript makes a quiet decision about how much to keep. And most people don't realize they're making it until the result is either unreadable or missing something they needed. The two ends of the spectrum have names. Verbatim, and clean verbatim.

Verbatim keeps everything. Every um, every uh, every false start, every stutter, every repeated word. If someone says, so, I, I think, um, we should, a verbatim transcript writes exactly that. It looks messy on the page, because real speech is messy. But sometimes that mess is the point.

Clean verbatim strips the noise out. It drops the filler words, tidies the false starts, fixes the obvious stumbles, and gives you a sentence that reads smoothly. So, I, I think, um, we should becomes, I think we should. Same meaning, far more readable.

So when do you want each? Verbatim matters when the exact words are evidence. Legal transcription, where a pause or a stammer could matter. Certain kinds of research, where how someone said something is part of the data. Court reporting. If a lawyer or a researcher might one day argue about the precise phrasing, you keep it all.

Clean verbatim is what almost everyone else actually wants. Podcast show notes. Meeting minutes. An article built from an interview. A blog post from a talk. In all of those, nobody wants to read the ums. They want the point, clearly. The filler adds nothing but friction.

There's a middle ground too, and it's where a lot of people live. Mostly clean, but keeping the meaningful pauses and the telling hesitations, because sometimes how someone hesitated is the story. A good approach is to start from clean verbatim, which is readable by default, and add back the raw detail only where it earns its place. That way you get a transcript that reads well, without throwing away the moments that mattered.

That's this episode of Talk Type. The full write up, with the links and sources, is in the show notes. Pepys transcribes any file or link, any length, pay once, and we never train on your audio. Your first sixty minutes are free at pepys dot co. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.