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Monthly Archives: October 2013

New series on expanding your business – looking for contributors

I’m planning a series of blog posts on how to expand and grow your business, and I’d like to feature guest posts from professionals and case studies from people who have taken the various paths, as they’re not something of which I have direct and personal experience.

Ideally, I’d like to have at least one professional (HR consultant, accountant, estate agent, etc.) and at least one case study for each topic.

I want to write about:

Changing from being a Sole Trader into a Limited Company
Going into a partnership with another person or company
Going VAT registered
Moving into premises
Employing your first staff members
Doing nothing – staying as a Sole Trader

and I want each article to cover:

From the professionals:

Why you should do it
When you should do it
How to do it
Potential benefits
Potential pitfalls

From the business owners:

Why you did it
When you did it (i.e. what stage was your business at?)
How you did it
Benefits gained
Pitfalls / disadvantages you experienced or saw coming and managed to avoid
Would you recommend it to other businesses? Why / why not?

Note: I am primarily aiming this at the UK market, however if you have useful information about how this stuff works in the US or elsewhere, do feel free to join in, just let me know the region to which your experience/advice applies.

What do you get out of it? Well, in the article where I mention you, I’ll put whatever links you’d like to your website, twitter feed etc at the bottom. I might be looking to put it into my new book, too, again with a full credit and links in the e-book version – let me know when you get in touch whether you’re OK with that. I can also keep you anonymous if you’d like to contribute but not have your name on the piece.

I get around 20,000 hits per month on this website / blog and that’s still building every month, and I have great Search Engine Optimisation so this website / blog shows up well on search engine searches.

If you’d like to take part, please contact me via email or my Contact Form.

These articles will appear on this blog and will be indexed in the Careers section of the blog.

3 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on October 31, 2013 in Blogging, Business, Guest posts, Jobs, New skills, Organisation

Tags: blogging, blogs, business, freelancing

Using Canned Responses in Gmail to create default email templates

30 Oct

Did you know that you can create default email templates in Gmail to save you typing the same message over and over again? Or are you using copy and paste to save typing? In this post, I’ll explain how to create and use “Canned Responses” in your Gmail email to save time and ensure that you send consistent messages.

Why would I want to create email templates?

If you run or work for a business, you’ll know that you send a lot of the same text over and over again. To use my business as an example, I send these emails a lot:

A pre-work email to students to explain exactly what I do and any issues around plagiarism that I need to tell them about
An email to transcription clients that lists the choices I need them to make so that I can provide the transcription they need (do they want me to type the exact utterances or tidy them up, insert time stamps ever 10 minutes, etc.?)
An email to enquirers to say that I can’t fit them into my schedule but here’s a list of recommended proofreaders
An email to my small business chat interviewees to ask for their annual update, telling them how many hits their interview has had and what they said last time

I save considerable amounts of time by automating these emails using Canned Responses, and I’m sure that you have at least a couple of standard texts that you’re always sending out.

Where can I find Canned Responses in Gmail?

Canned responses are a “Lab” feature in Gmail. This means that they’re an experimental feature, written by a third party, a bit like a plugin that you can add to your email. Having said all that about them being experimental, I’ve been using them for YEARS now and they haven’t broken or disappeared.

To access the Labs, go into the Gmail settings by clicking on the cog icon at the top right of your screen, then choosing Settings:

Then choose the Labs tab at the top:

I’ve already got Canned Responses enabled, as shown here, but you will need to scroll down until you find it, or enter “Canned Responses” in the Search for a Lab search box (not the top search box):

Any labs that you enable will show at the top of your screen, and you can scroll down to see the others that are available, each with a description of what they do:

So do have a little explore another day! For now, click Enable and then Save Changes under the search box or at the bottom of the screen (to get back to your email, click on Inbox on the far left).

How do I use a Canned Response?

I’m going to show you what happens when you use a Canned Response first, to help you to understand what they are, and then we’ll look at creating a new one.

Let’s pretend I’ve received an email from a music journalist wanting to know about my transcription services:

I click on the Reply arrow at the top right or in the Reply pane at the bottom to start my reply:

But instead of typing my reply, I click the More options button at the bottom right of the screen. This brings me up a list of, well, more options, oddly enough … and then I click on Canned Responses:

Here I have a list of all of the canned responses I’ve set up. I’m going to click on Transcription conventions at the top, and when I do, the text will insert itself into my email automatically, saving me masses of typing!

It’s just like a normal email that I’ve typed, however, and I can add a greeting and do any editing to the text that I require in order to personalise it:

How do I set up a new canned response?

To set up a new canned response, start a new message in Gmail and type your standard text. I haven’t addressed this one, but you can save an email that strikes you as a particularly useful one to use again, at whatever stage. One important point, though: when you want to save it as a canned response, delete any signature file you have at the end of your emails. If you don’t delete it, it will become part of the canned response. Then when you add it to an email, your signature will be automatically added at the end anyway, duplicating it.

So, delete your signature and press that More options button at the bottom right before you send your email:

Now scroll down past the canned responses you have already set up (if you haven’t set up any, this will be almost at the top, underneath save) and select New canned response:

It will prompt you for a name for your canned response:

Type this in and press OK:

Now this response will appear in your list next time you want to use an email template:

How do I change a canned response message?

if you want to alter a canned response message, the easiest way to do it is:

Start a new email
Load the original canned response
Choose More options / Canned responses then choose the appropriate Canned response name under the Save sub-heading
The new version will be saved to replace the old one

What else can I do with canned responses?

You can use your canned responses in a filter. If you want a special message to go out to a particular customer automatically, To do this, go into Settings – Filters. I have already set up a filter to mark emails that are forwarded from my old email address as coming from there. I am now going to edit that filter:

Having hit Edit, I then select Continue:

I then access the options where I can choose to send a Canned Response to anything coming through that filter, and I choose the Canned Response from the list:

And finally choose Update Filter to make the changes stick.

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Have you found this useful? Please comment – especially if you’d like to see more Gmail tips – and use the sharing buttons to share this post with your friends and contacts!

103 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on October 30, 2013 in Business

Tags: business

Localisation as a career

28 Oct

I was recently asked for some hints about developing a career in localisation, and so here I share a bit of information about this rather specialised area of work.

What is localisation?

I covered the definition of localisation in an earlier post, but basically it’s all about changing content (whether that’s content in a novel, a website, marketing materials, dialogue in a computer game, instructions for operating equipment, etc.) so that it works in a different geographical location.

Typically, being a British English native speaker, I am asked to localise from American English into British English, for the British (or British English influenced English speaking) market.

“Oh,” you might cry, “that just means you change color to colour and organize to organise, right?” Well, there is a bit more to it than that, and I really don’t think it’s something that just anyone – even any editor – can do.

What background and skills do you need to do localisation?

As well as the classic attention to detail and background in perhaps editing, or indeed translation (it is actually often seen as a branch of translation, which brings its own issues, as we’ll find below), I think that it is vital to have experience in the language out of which you are localising: the way it works, its vocabulary, its punctuation, its spelling.

I used to work for an American company in its UK office. I spent a lot of time working on documents aimed for the two marketplaces. I travelled to America and had a lot of dealings with American colleagues, as well as travelling to America at other times, and got a good grasp of the difference between the two cultures. Still, like translators are meant to do, I will only localise out of US English into UK English. I do edit American English, so I see it and am made aware of its differences and special rules on at least one job per week.

Because of the links with translation, you also need a very special set of skills to do with operating specific, specialised translation software – which is very often not easy to use. I’ll talk about that in a minute.

I’ve also got a number of reference books – the New Oxford Style Manual is good on the variants in spelling, and I have other books in addition to the resources I use to edit in US English.

What is involved in US – UK English localisation?

As I mentioned above, it’s not just a question of changing the or spellings to our and taking out some zs (actually, British English of the Oxford variety does allow zs; however, I’ve found that all of my localisation clients or those who ask for work in specifically British English prefer to have the s spellings which they associate with British English – I do as I’m asked!). American and British English differ in terms of their spelling, punctuation and other grammar, and terminology. Here’s an invented example (US English on the left):

Now, of course, English is nothing if not subjective, and you might not agree with my choices here, but this serves as an example of the level of work involved in localisation. I might not change so much in every sentence, but there are an awful lot of issues to be aware of.

Another important issue is the range of texts involved in localisation projects. Most of mine have been under Non Disclosure Agreements, but I can tell you that I’ve worked on instructions for medical devices; dialogue for computer games; error messages for software; marketing materials for various large multinationals; and quizzes for people who sell a particular brand of product. So you need to be aware of the different registers involved in English writing, perhaps more even than when you’re editing.

How do localisation jobs work?

Herein lies the rub. As I mentioned earlier, localisation is often seen as akin to translation. And very often, a British English localisation is just one of a whole slew of translations into other languages that is being done, or it’s being handled by a company that handles translations and is used to dealing with translation software.

So, while pretty well all of my editing and proofreading jobs come in Word or PDF files, just one document to be annotated or changed, my localisation jobs come in the form of:

A Word document that has been output from translation software and has two columns, one for US English (the Source) and one for UK English (the Target), usually with the US English pasted into the UK column to be changed and marked up, broken up into sentences or sentence fragments, often with some highlighted in different colours
An Excel document in two or more columns, again broken up into sentences or sentence fragments. Sometimes the UK English is pre-populated into the Target column, sometimes not.
A file to be manipulated using standard translation software like Trados or Across. To use the full versions of these, you might need to buy and download somewhat expensive software.
A file to manipulated using the client’s own proprietary translation software – this is often web-based and free, but can take some learning, and they are ALL DIFFERENT

I’m not going to go into the details here, but basically any work done in a translation management system can be a bit frustrating for the localiser, as typically you’re not changing words in every segment, yet you will have to mark each segment as translated, often by hand and using a repetitive set of actions. All very well if you’re a translator, poring over every word, not so great when you are only changing one segment in five!

How do I get localisation work?

I tend to get my localisation work in two ways:

Through my membership of Proz.com, which is a jobs (and more) website specifically for translators, but which does have editing (usually non-native English texts) and transcription jobs
Through people searching the web and finding that I discuss and offer localisation

I have several regular localisation clients. However, I don’t think I would want to do only localisation, as it’s quite a specific field and the projects involved can be quite long and complex.

In conclusion, localisation is something I would only suggest you go into if you have …

Good, solid experience with US and UK English
A high tolerance and capacity for learning new software interfaces fast and dealing with often recalcitrant and tricky systems

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Help – my Word comment box initials keep changing

23 Oct

I had a query about this issue the other day and found there were no blog posts about it. Now there are.

My correspondent was busy adding comments to a document. Each time he did so, his initials appeared in the comment box, as they do (I will post soon on how to change your initials in your comment boxes). But each time he pressed Save, the initials changed back to “A”. Why?

Well, I went to look and it took me and a friend searching to find a rather obscure help forum that explained what was happening! So here’s what you do to stop the initials in your comment balloons changing by themselves in Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013.

Why do the initials in my comment balloons keep changing every time I press Save?

The reason for your own initials disappearing is that Word is carefully applying a rule called “Remove personal information from file properties on save”. The properties are details attached to your document about who created and edited the document. And how do you change this?

Go into Word Options.The way into this differs for Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013, although fortunately all of these routes end up in pretty well the same place, so …

Accessing Word Options in Word 2007:

Click on the Office button in the top left of the screen, then click on Word Options at the bottom of the box:

Accessing Word Options in Office 2010:

In Word 2010, click on the File tab and then select Options, one up from the bottom of the list on the left hand side:

Accessing Word Options in Word 2013:

In Word 2013, click on the File tab:

This has the effect of making your screen disappear, but you will get a list of things to do, out of which you select Options at the very bottom of the list (you can click that left-pointing arrow in a circle at the top left to get back to your document):

Accessing the Trust Center

The Options screen that will now come up is very similar in Word 2007, 2010 and 2013, so I’m going to use screenshots from Word 2010 as a middle way from now on – the others differ slightly, but you will still see the same options to choose from.

From here, click on Trust Center and then Trust Center Settings:

Now select Privacy Options, and you should find an option “Remove personal information from file properties on save”. Note that if this is enabled, it will be ticked and you will be able to untick it. Here, it’s greyed out, but you can see where you can find it:

Once you have unticked this box, your initials will remain on your comment boxes however many times you save or close and open your document!

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Why not take a look at these related topics, which should help you with any other comment box issues?

What to do if your comment boxes go tiny in Word

What to do if your comment boxes start running from right to left

Changing the language in your comment balloons

Customising Track Changes

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

Do let me know if this has helped you, saved your bacon, etc. – and do share with the buttons at the bottom of this article.

5 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on October 23, 2013 in Copyediting, New skills, Students, Word, Writing

Tags: Copyediting, errors, students, Word tips, Word2007, Word2010, Word2013, writing

How do you know that you’re running a mature business?

21 Oct

Lots of posts and books and blogs and courses and STUFF have been written about start-ups and about starting a new business. But what about when that phase is over? Some people, especially, it seems, in the technology sector, like to bounce from start-up to start-up, selling the business on or changing it in some way as soon as it has settled down. But what if you’re in the one business for the long run? How do you tell when you’ve moved from the start-up phase to running a mature business?

What is it like running a start-up business?

In my experience, the first few years of running your own business are characterised by

Uncertainty – will I get customers, will I keep customers, where will my next customers come from
Active marketing – trying different marketing methods, signing up for directory websites, trying some adverts
Overwork – working all the hours there are for clients who need everything now! It’s also possible that you’re working at a day job while developing the business on the side
Underpay – thinking “can I actually charge for this? That much? Really?
Constant change – changing strategy, changing business model, changing clients, changing business cards
A change in lifestyle and your social life – especially if this is your first start-up, you’ll disappear from your friendship groups, become invisible to your family, and probably start hanging out with new business chums as well

What is it like running a mature business?

I’m in Libro’s fifth year now, and things are markedly different from when I started. I know a few people who are just starting out, which helps me remember what it was like and see the differences. Here’s what it’s like once you’re up and running

Certainty – much fewer worries about where customers are coming from; working with regulars who you know well, knowing their payment schedules and how they operate
Less marketing – many more jobs will be coming from repeat clients and recommendations, so marketing is more about brand awareness and making sure that people know you’re there, rather than grasping for new clients all the time
Steady work – you have reclaimed your evenings and weekends
Steady pay – you have worked up your rates of pay to industry standards, and are confident that what you do is worth what you charge for it (however, you might be on tax payment on account if you’re in the UK, which can be a slightly tricky transition)
Less change – while you still check for return on investment, buy the new technology you need to run your business and keep up with your personal development, things should be more stable, changing when you choose to change them
You get your life back – you can go back to your friends and family, but you also have a peer group of people in your industry who you can use as a mutual support group

How do you get from start-up to mature business?

These are some things that I’ve done – what do you think are the key processes in this move?

Outsource some functions of the business – design and accountancy are key ones that I’ve done, but you might go ahead and outsource all of your admin functions
Optimise your customer base (I’ve written about this in more detail here) so you have good, reliable, regular customers who bring in a good rate of return
Organise your work so that most of it comes from regulars who book it in advance, and have a system to record what you’ve got booked in so you can fit new work around it (I use a simple Gantt chart)
Turn away work and recommend it on rather than taking on anything and everything
Build a good network of peers who you can pass work to and from whom you can get advice and support or just a laugh or a rant occasionally (especially important if you work on your own)

Giving something back

When I was talking about this article on social media, someone pointed out that another feature of a mature business is that you find yourself advising people on how to do it! True indeed – from my experience …

I wrote a post on how to become a proofreader which ended up as a whole careers section on my website, because so many people were asking me how to do it
I wrote a book on my first year as a full-time self-employed business person
I share the knowledge I’ve gained of social media by volunteering at the Social Media Surgeries
I am informally mentoring a few colleagues through their first years as self-employed editors

And that’s one of the main benefits of running a mature business for me.

Who are you calling mature?

I’m starting to plan my new book at the moment. Working title: “Who are you calling mature? Running a successful business after the start-up stage”. What do you think of the title? Do you think this would be a useful addition to the millions of business books that are out there?

Do pop a comment on this post if you have anything to say about that or any of the points I’ve raised above – I always love hearing from my readers!

16 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on October 21, 2013 in Business, New skills, Organisation

Tags: business, freelancing, skills

How do I change footnotes to endnotes in Word?

17 Oct

As part of my series on footnotes and endnotes, here’s how to turn your footnotes into endnotes and your endnotes into footnotes in Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013.

We begin with a document with footnotes, arranged at the bottom of their relevant page, as footnotes tend to be:

But we want to turn these footnotes into endnotes. How?

Go to the Footnotes menu, which you can find in the References tab:

Click on the little arrow at the bottom right to bring up the Footnote/Endnote Options dialogue box:

Here you will find a Convert button to press. Press the button:

This is context-specific, so if you have only footnotes, the option to convert endnotes to footnotes and to swap the two will be greyed out. Hit OK (or, if you already have both endnotes and footnotes, choose the option you wish to use then hit OK).

Your footnotes will have changed to endnotes:

What is the best mix of customers to have?

15 Oct

If you’ve got a mature business that is up and running and busy, then you’ve probably used something like these criteria to choose which clients to work with, and you might have used these ways to turn one-offs into regular customers. But what is the best mix of customers to end up with?

Obviously, in an ideal world, all of your jobs as a freelancer will be fun, interesting and high-paying, for clients who pay up on time. But, well, we’re not in an ideal world. The paying on time thing is non-negotiable for me (although I’m always prepared to listen if a client is having cash flow problems, IF they tell me about them), but I’ve learned to live with the fact that not all of the high-paying jobs are fascinating, and not all of the really fun ones pay well. It’s all about balance, and in this post I’m going to share with you how I balance my mix of customers, which might help you, too.

What are the types of customer?

Whatever industry you’re in, you tend to have a few types of customer:

Customers who send you a lot of work regularly (great, although try not to rely on just one or two of these, just in case, and sometimes they can get a bit demanding)
Customers who send you a bit of work irregularly (only keep these on if you really can slot them in as and when)
Customers who pay high rates (why? they may have set the rates for their industry and they’re in a region with higher costs of living and pay rates for freelancers)
Customers who pay lower rates (why? you might have long-standing customers on a historical lower rate or offer discounts, as I do, for special groups of customers such as students, individuals and music journalists)
Customers who have fascinating work that’s right up your street and relates to your interests
Customers who have dull work which nevertheless you can tackle

Customers who always need their work to be done at the last minute
Customers who send you stuff that’s at the edge of your comfort zone – or outside it

I’ve put a little space before those two, because they’re the ones who you really do need to minimise.

As I said, in an ideal world, you would have customers with loads of fascinating work who pay high rates. But that’s not always going to happen, so it’s a matter of …

BALANCE

Isn’t it always, though?

Boulders, pebbles, sand

Time management techniques make use of the boulders, pebbles and sand metaphor when talking about how to fit your tasks into your day. The idea is that you slot the big jobs (the boulders) in first, then you can fit pebbles (smaller jobs) in around them, and fill up the gaps with sand (I usually see the sand as being my admin tasks). So, if I have a big transcription that must be done by tomorrow and will take 3 hours, I will plan to do that in the afternoon, with a couple of small editing jobs slotted in around it.

It’s the same with customer types.

It would be great if you loved loved LOVED all of your projects, but some of them are still going to be more interesting than others. To take some aspects of my work as an example (but as I said, this works for all industries) …

Localisation is my most lucrative work but it’s often fairly repetitive marketing or web texts. It also often uses specialised software that can be quite tricky to work with.
Working with translators is a specialised job and so my rates are higher than for native English editing. The texts I get from my translators and agencies are varied and often interesting.
I have a particular transcription client who pays great rates and has interesting tapes to send me – they used to have a conference for me to transcribe for every 2 months and now it’s less regular but still interesting. I now have another regular corporate transcription client.
I love transcribing for music journalists. Music is an obsession of mine and I love both hearing all the bits that don’t make it into the articles and seeing how the articles are written up from the tapes I’ve transcribed. But I do charge these clients less than my corporate transcription rates, because they’re usually freelancers like me. These are very, very rarely uninteresting, even if I’m not a big fan of the music style. Even if it’s Justin Bieber.
Student work can be interesting but can be very tricky and time-consuming, typically involves quite a lot of emailing back and forth, and I charge a lower rate than for corporate editing. I used to work on Master’s coaching, but found that it was difficult to commit to small bits of work coming at short notice over a long period of time.

Case study: how I balance my customers out

To maintain the analogy of the boulders and pebbles, this is how I manage this customer base:

Boulders have to be regulars with the more lucrative end of the work. I have kept down my number of localisation clients – I could do just localisation, but it would be a bit same-y and I would end up relying on very few, large clients, which is something I avoid. So: regular localisation clients, regular translator clients and at the moment a large regular transcription client are the boulders of my client base.
Rocks (ha – you’re going to laugh in a minute) are my music journalists (see what I did there?). The work is fun, the clients are lovely, and I get more return on investment than just the money. But I have to be careful not to take on too many of these, because I do not make as much per hour and I am in this job to make a living. I do let the odd rock crash into my personal time, because these clients are often on odd schedules. But I encourage them to book me as far in advance as they can, and they do pay extra for urgent work.
Pebbles – student work and the occasional one-off fiction or non-fiction book referral from a regular customer. I’m afraid I am more likely to take on a referral than somebody out of the blue these days – but I will always refer on anyone who I can’t take on. I already pass on all Master’s students to one of three colleagues who have the time and attention they need. Also in this category come the few clients I still have who send small projects regularly – if you have few enough of these, you can slot them in around the rocks and boulders. I have one client who sends me middle-sized projects but with lovely long deadlines – work I can break into pebbles and pour around the bigger jobs.
Sand of administration – my monthly invoicing session is a boulder, and because it’s sand, so each job is small, I can slot a few email replies or jotting down some blog post ideas among all of these.

It’s all about the balance

When it comes down to it, it’s all about balance and return on investment (which doesn’t take a solely monetary form).

I could do just localisation all day every day, and push for more of that work, but it would be a bit repetitive and I could run the risk of only working with a few, large clients, which leaves me a bit exposed.

I could just work with translators and translation agencies, but I’d only really be editing then and I like the variety of my other work.

I could just work with music journalists and have a whale of a time listening to all sorts and picking up on new band to like. But the work can fluctuate madly (in a nod to a certain publication this week, it can oscillate wildly from all to nothing), so it would be unreliable as a steady source of income. And I’d probably get RSI.

I could just work with students and self-publishing novelists but I wouldn’t make enough to live on doing that full time, and again, I’d just be editing all day, every day.

By balancing all of these different customers (and you can do the same, whether you’re a roofer with a mix of full roofs, porches and repair jobs, or a decorator doing whole houses, front doors and window screens, or a graphic designer creating adverts, logos and cartoons), I get variety, balance my income and have fun!

How do you do it?

Whether you’re a fellow editor / transcriber / localiser or you’re in a different industry, I’d love to know how you balance your different types of customer. Do share in the comments

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If you enjoyed this post, please click one or more of the share buttons below.

Find more articles about careers and freelancing in this resource guide. Related articles:

How to decide who to work with.

Turning a one-off customer into a regular.

How to make more money in your freelance business

When should I say no?

18 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on October 15, 2013 in Business, Jobs, Organisation

Tags: business, freelancing, skills

How do I add endnotes to a Word document?

09 Oct

Writers use endnotes to find a place for additional text which doesn’t fit into the flow of the document at hand but needs to be included for reference purposes. The reasons for doing this are the same as for using footnotes (to provide translations, to expand on information in the text, to provide references for sources used, etc.)

What is the difference between footnotes and endnotes?

The only difference between footnotes and endnotes lies in their position.

The text of footnotes sits at the bottom of the page on which the footnote is referenced.

The text of endnotes sits at the end of the chapter, article or even the whole book in which the footnote is referenced.

What do endnotes look like?

Unlike footnotes, which can use symbols or numbers, an endnote will usually be marked using a raised number after the bit of text that they refer to, like this.¹ The reason for this is that a whole set of endnotes might appear at the end of a chapter or book, and there aren’t enough symbols to cover more than about five.

The text of the endnote will be marked with the same number, and will include all of the text that you want to appear outside the main text.

Endnotes at the end of a chapter will usually start at 1 for each new chapter. However, endnotes for an entire book might be numbered either starting at 1 for each new chapter or running sequentially through the whole book, running into the hundreds.

Sometimes endnotes don’t have a number in the text, but just refer in their own text to a section of the main document. These tend to be done by hand rather than automatically in the way I’m going to show you today.

You can see here that the endnote number is on the first page (circled) but the endnote itself appears at the end of the whole document:

How do I create an endnote in Word 2007 and Word 2010?

The Endnote section is found in the References tab of the ribbon (not Insert):

Place the cursor in the position where you want the endnote to appear and either press the Insert Endnote button (as above) or click on the drop down arrow for your options (I find that sometimes the Endnote numbering defaults to something odd, so it’s useful to do this:

This will bring up your endnote options. Choose your options (see next section) and when you press Insert, a number will appear in your text, and an endnote number will appear right at the end of your document (or chapter), ready for your endnote text.

Type the text you want into your endnote field, noting that you can change the paragraph style, size and font as with any text, although it’s common for the endnote font to be smaller than the main document font.

To insert the next endnote, follow the same sequence, although once you’ve set up your options, you can just hit the Insert endnote button instead of dropping down the options.

How do I delete an endnote?

Using the automated endnote system means that the numbering will adjust itself to stay correct if you delete and move notes around.

Don’t highlight the endnote itself and delete it. This has no effect on the numbering.

Instead, highlight the number in the text or position your cursor at the point just after it and press delete.

Here, I’m deleting Endnote 3. Press delete and

changes to:

What are the endnote options?

We have already seen that clicking on the little arrow at the bottom right of the Footnotes section, brings up a range of Footnote and Endnote options that you can customise:

Here you can choose the number format, whether the endnotes appear at the end of each section (you will need to apply Section Breaks to make this work) or at the end of the whole document, and whether the numbering starts at the beginning of each new section or just runs through all of the document continuously.

For more detail on these options, see the relevant sections in the article on Footnotes.

How do I make the endnotes appear on a new page?

To make your endnotes appear on a new page, simply add a Page Break before them by putting your cursor at the end of the main text and pressing Control-Enter.

How to add endnotes in Word 2003

In Word 2003, you add endnotes using the Insert – Reference menus. The footnote options are then the same as above.

How not to add endnotes to Word documents

It is NOT RECOMMENDED to add endnotes manually (insert a superscript number and type the note at the bottom of the document) If you do this, you will lose all the advantages of using this automated system:

automatically adding the numbers in order
automatically renumbering the endnotes if you delete or add one or move one around

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In this article we’ve learnt what an endnote is, why you use them, all about inserting and deleting them and the options for customsing them.

Related posts from this blog:

How do I add footnotes to a Word document?

Changing footnotes to endnotes

How do I change the format of my endnotes and footnotes?

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

7 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on October 9, 2013 in Errors, New skills, Short cuts, Word, Writing

Tags: errors, learning, research, skills, students, thesis, Word tips, Word2007, Word2010

Ten top tips for transcribers

07 Oct

I’ve been advising a colleague on how to develop the transcription side of her business recently, and these tips and hints came out as being the most useful for her – so I’m sharing them with you, too. Do comment if you find these helpful or have more to share!

1. Make sure that you can do it!

Before you launch into your first transcription project, check that you can do it first! This includes:

Being able to touch type
Being able to type quickly
Having the requisite technology

You can have a look at this post to check you’re suited for the work, and this one about the technology to use. Transcription jobs often come in at short notice and have tight turnarounds, so it really pays to be prepared.

2. Make sure that your ergonomics are tip-top

Transcription is the most demanding of my tasks. Typically, you’re pounding a keyboard for several hours at a time, typing as fast as you can while straining to hear the tape. Here are some of the things I and my colleagues have learned:

Use a proper keyboard with little legs, not a laptop keyboard, even if it’s propped up
Make sure that your chair is adjusted so that you can sit straight, looking slightly down at the screen, with your forearms sloping slightly down to your hands and your hands arched over the keys
Make sure that your feet are flat on the floor with comfortable bends to the knees; if not, put a box or footrest in front of your chair
Make sure that the cable on your headphones is long enough to reach your computer without you having to bend at all sideways or twist your head
Make sure that your headphones or earphones are comfortable
Take regular breaks to stand up, stretch, give your ears a rest and refocus your eyes – once an hour at very least (I do some squats and calf raises every hour as I seem to store tension in my legs when I am transcribing)

3. Get software to manage your transcriptions

Professional transcription software allows you to control the tape using function keys or even a pedal (like in the old days of audio typing) and will make you much quicker at doing the work. More information on software here – make sure you get used to it first!

4. Make sure that you understand what the client wants

You wouldn’t believe how many choices are involved when it comes to providing transcriptions for clients. Here are just some of them:

Do they want you to type out exactly what the speakers say, take out the ums and ers but retain the rest, polish up the sentences so they make grammatical sense, or make non-native English speakers sound like native English speakers?
If you are transcribing an interview, do they want you to include the full questions or just notes?
If the person who they are interviewing says that something is off the record, do they want you to stop typing, or take it down and mark it up as off the record?
Do they want you to include and mark pauses, and how?
How do they want you to mark unclear sections or words that you can’t understand but can type a phonetic version?
Do they want you to timestamp the document (i.e insert 05:00, 10:00 etc. at the relevant points in the document), and how often, if at all?
How do they want you to differentiate between the speakers? (this could range from first initial, surname, in bold, with a colon to putting the questions in italics with no names)
Do they want US or UK spelling? Oxford -z- spellings or “British English” -s- spellings?
Do they have a special font or line spacing they wish you to use?
Do they have a template that they wish you to use?

I have experienced all of these variations in my own transcription work. You may be working in a team where it’s vital to have all transcriptions looking the same, or the client might just work with the transcriptions in a particular way.

I have a standard list of questions I send out to clients if they don’t specify, so that I can make sure that I’m doing what they want.

5. If it is anything but a general text, ask for a list of terminology

When I work with music journalists, I always ask for the band name so I can check the album and song titles and band members’ names – I feel more professional if I get that right for them.

If I’m working with a particular kind of client and there seem to be a lot of specific terms, I ask for a list of terms, or send my own list and ask them to check if they’re correct, especially if it’s a long-term project. Again, this makes you look professional and avoids the client having to do any extra work to correct your interpretation of terms.

Of course, it helps if you know a bit about the topic to start with. I always turn down medical and legal transcription jobs because they’re very specialised, and I like to think that I know about music, but I did have to ask a client if I’d heard “Bowel Bass” correctly (I had!).

6. Get to grips with Word’s auto complete function

Auto complete can save you keystrokes and time by allowing you to type a few letters or a word fragment and have it expand into a word or phrase. I’ve written an introduction to this topic with more detail on personalising it, if you want to read up on this. Being able to type “tyv” and have “thank you very much” appear in your document, or having your “beh” turn into “behaviourally” is key to cutting down the time taken to type out that tape.

7. Monitor how long it takes you to do an hour or whatever, on average

Once you’ve got into transcribing, monitor how long it takes you to transcribe an hour of tape, on average. This will help you to predict workflows and give your client an estimate of how long you will take to complete their work.

However, do note two things here:

Time taken can vary considerably (see Point 8 below) so always under-promise and over-deliver. My average rates vary from 2 hours typing to 4 hours typing for one hour of tape, although my absolute average is around 3 hours typing for every hour of tape
Don’t forget to build in breaks – if I’m sent 3 hours of tape at midday, it will not take me until 9pm!

8. Be aware of the variables

I’ve known people who are new to transcribing to get upset when a tape takes them a long time. It might be just that the job is difficult or has some factors that would make it take longer for ANYONE to complete.. It can really vary – here are some reasons why a tape could take longer to type than average:

It’s a new client or project – I always speed up as I get used to the client’s voices and terminology and the way the conversations go
The sound quality is poor, leaving you to have to rewind and go over much more than usual
The job involves taking down every single word the speakers say and they have a lot of repeated words and / or talk very quickly
The speakers have heavy accents
There are more than two speakers and they are difficult to differentiate (that’s why I charge more for more than two speakers)

As I said in Point 7 – try to have a listen to the tape before you make any promises on timing, and always under-promise and over-deliver!

9. Be a perfectionist but not too much of a perfectionist

It’s brilliant if you take great care over your transcription and try to make it all as good as you can. It’s not brilliant if you spend hours labouring over every tiny section of tape, trying to make everything out or frantically Googling for obscure titles of album tracks:

Sometimes the tape will be unclear and no one could hear it – mark it as unclear, pop the tape timing down and move on
Sometimes people talk over each other and you can’t hear what one or both of them is saying – mark that and pop the tape timing down and move on
Sometimes people use words or talk about people whose names you cannot make out – have a go at sticking down what you can hear, mark with a question mark and the tape timing and move on

I know that when I’ve read some of the stories that my journalist clients have written, I’ve thought – “Oh, THAT’s what they said!” and I’m very experienced at this work. The clients don’t mind, as long as you get most of it and tell them about what you can’t make out. Often they will be quality checked by someone else, or the journalist will know much more about the band than you do, or they might have a little giggle at a mis-hearing and move on from it. The world will not end, and I don’t believe that anyone can transcribe a whole long tape completely perfectly.

10. Ask for feedback

Each time that I complete the first job for a new client, I ask them if there is anything that I could do differently that would help them to work with the text I produce. And if I don’t get any feedback at all from a corporate client (some of them only feed back when there is an error, which I find a bit challenging!), I will ask them for it. If you really didn’t grasp a section of tape or fear you mis-heard an important term and it’s going to come up again, ask for feedback.

And if the feedback is good AND the client says it’s OK to use it, pop it on your references page!

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Thanks to Laura Ripper for helping me to put together this list. Was it helpful? Is there anything else that I haven’t mentioned that would have helped you when you were a new transcriber?

If you want to learn more about Transcription as a career, buy my book: A Quick Guide to Transcription as a Career – buy from Amazon UK or visit the book’s web page for worldwide links and news.

Related posts on this blog:

Transcription as a career

Why you need a human transcriber

Technology for professional transcription

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40 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on October 7, 2013 in Business, Transcription

Tags: business, freelancing, learning, skills, Transcription

Have you got a Troublesome Pair?

03 Oct

Is there a troublesome pair of words in your life that you constantly mix up, or have you encountered a terrible twosome?

Suggest a brand new pair for me to write about that I haven’t already covered (do see the index for the ones I’ve done so far) and I’ll include your name (and a link, if you’d like*) on the post when it’s published.

I’m looking forward to hearing about your favourites … pop a comment on here and do share, too!

Index to the Troublesome Pairs so far.

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* inclusion of links is at my discretion: if I find the link you give me is to a fake goods sales site or pharmaceuticals etc., I reserve the right to remove it from your comment and not post it in the article)

9 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on October 3, 2013 in Troublesome pairs

Tags: errors