Speaker 1: These mistakes will cost you a lot of money and time if you end up not being paid for the transcription jobs you've done despite taking the time to work on them. This is why. Do you want to make more money with transcription jobs? Do you want to get high ratings and good reviews when you work on transcription jobs and eventually land direct transcription clients? Then do this. Avoid the following mistakes. As we begin, please give this video a thumbs up by clicking the like button below. I will walk you through serious mistakes that you should avoid if you want to make money doing transcription jobs and I will actually tell you how to avoid them. So watch to the end or you'll miss out on very important information. One of the most common transcription mistakes is atomic typos. Atomic typos are one-letter mistakes that are very easy to miss but can have a very significant effect on the finished transcript. This is where you end up typing a word that actually exists but is completely different from the word that is in the audio or video file. They are a special kind of spelling mistakes that your spell checker will miss because they are actually real words. For example, the person in the audio or video says country but you type county or the word in the audio file is evaluation but you type evolution. Typing peace instead of peace or conservation instead of conversation. Atomic typos end up changing the meaning of the sentence entirely because they don't fit the context of the audio or the video file. If you think atomic typos are bad, you haven't met homophones. These are words that sound exactly the same but have different meanings. Homophones are one of the most common transcription mistakes made by both beginner and experienced transcribers and they are second on the list. Now the most common homophones are there, they are, they are. You can't miss these ones when transcribing and it's very easy to get them wrong. Here are a few more examples to drive the point home. Break and break. Not and not. Lose and lose. Where and where. Two, two, and two. Homophones just like atomic typos can change the meaning of the statement. Have you ever read a statement out loud and it makes no sense at all? That's what I'm talking about. For example, there you are or where did you go. The third mistake to avoid is spelling errors. We have two categories of spelling mistakes. The first one is misspelling names of people, places, companies, or organizations etc. The second one is general spelling and grammar mistakes. Let's look at the misspelling of names. Names of people, places, and things can be spelled in different ways. For example, my name Tess has two S's but I know of a girl with the same name but only uses one S. It's Ashley or Ashley, Leslie or Leslie, McGregor or McGregor. This spelling mistake is commonly made by transcribers who don't do research when transcribing. Let's say you are transcribing an audio and the speaker says that she had a conversation with Leslie Miles from an organization called Humanize. To avoid misspelling the names, it's best to look them up. Google the company Humanize and try to find out how this particular Leslie spells her name. My research will start on Google to LinkedIn to even Twitter if necessary. Is this video being useful so far? If it is, please give it a thumbs up by hitting the like button so it can reach more people. Now let's look at the general spelling and grammar mistakes. General spelling and grammar mistakes are pretty common. Luckily you don't really have to struggle with this because there are a number of tools that can help you eliminate and correct them as you are transcribing the audio. There is the MS Word Spell Checker. You can also use a tool like Grammarly to check your grammar, spelling, style mistakes, word choice, and more. Moving on swiftly to mistake number four which is mishearing words and this is a capital offense if you ask me and it's a very common transcription mistake. If you mishear something you end up typing the wrong thing entirely. For example you hear the word evolution instead of evaluation or you hear pipe instead of type. Mishears are dangerous in transcription as they render the transcript inaccurate and most transcribers have suffered because of this. The best way to avoid them is to improve your listening skills but I'll talk more about this later in the video. For now just know that a mishear is when you hear the wrong thing and you end up typing that wrong thing. Mistake number five is using automatic transcription software. Now this might not be a mistake entirely, it really depends. Have you ever heard of Otter.ai, Temi, Trint, Sonix, or Vocalmatic? These are automatic transcription software. While it's true that speech recognition software is getting better every day it's still not perfect. As a result it's more prone to error than human transcription. Unfortunately many beginner transcriptionists who have not had any kind of training and have no transcription experience use this automatic transcription software to make their work easier. Now using the automatic transcription software is not a problem. The problem comes in when you assume what the software has transcribed is the correct thing. I've heard people complain that oh Tess I used Otter.ai but I still failed the transcription test. Yes because Otter.ai is not perfect. It is advisable to edit and proofread automatically generated transcripts extensively before submitting it for review because they have very many errors and if you don't know what you're doing or don't know what you're looking for you will miss them completely. So how do you avoid all these mistakes? Watch and learn. The first thing you should do is invest in good earphones or headsets. A good pair of headsets or earphones will make your work very easy. Speaking out of experience. Kindly check the links in the description to see the ones that I recommend. The second thing is to improve your listening skills. Now in addition to investing in the best headsets good listening skills are a must in transcription. You are required to make out conversations despite challenges like heavy accents, background noises, soft voices and crosstalks. This means that you have to apply attentive listening to every audio or video file you are transcribing. No client or platform wants to receive a transcript full of inaudibles and crosstalk tags. That beats the point of transcription. Now you can play the file multiple times or reduce and increase the speed in order to capture what is being said but the best way to improve your listening skills is to practice. Practice transcribing different types of audios. Thirdly, do extensive research when transcribing. Accuracy is everything in transcription. You want to ensure that every word or phrase has been spelled correctly in line with the context of the file. Now we don't want to find football terms in a file that's talking about cooking unless they mention football. Make google your best friend. Research names of people, companies, organizations, brands in discernible words and get the correct spelling. For instance if one of the names mentioned in an audio file on rugby is John Thornett, well this is what I have heard. I will not type John Thornett and just move on. I will go to google and type what I have heard and even add rugby at the end for context purposes. From the google results I will learn that the correct spelling is t-h-o-r-n-e-t-t Thornett. Number four is to improve your grammar and punctuation A good transcriber understands the English language. In fact that's the main requirement if you want to become a transcriber. He or she knows where to put periods, commas, quotations, etc. Transcripts should be neat and readable. Most importantly they should capture the original thoughts of the speaker. There are many resources on the internet that can help with punctuation and spelling. All you have to do is look for them and use them. Number five and this is the most important thing you should do to avoid all these mistakes we've talked about. Proofreading and editing. Going through your work after you are done transcribing will save you a great deal. After transcribing an audio file I usually go through it at least three times. This is to make sure that every word I have transcribed fits in the transcript and is within the context of the audio. Now you are able to correct mishears, spelling mistakes, additions and omissions at this stage. It's a very very important stage that most people overlook and if you want to know how much you can make transcribing and where to get transcription jobs for beginners watch this next video.