afterthoughts

a girlfriend and her boyfriend eating lunch at home.

i have transcribed a conversation once before with my students during a novel discussion, and it was so tedious that i never did it again. this conversation was while eating lunch, so chewing and swallowing gave us each time between exchanges. the problem i had while transcribing class discussion was the constant overlap between 3 or more students vyying for the floor, and the sometimes fuzzy outpour or confused thoughts that children often exhibit. so between two adults, it was more orderly, with the rules of conversation, argument, disagreements, etc. in place. also, our familiarity with one another (a mixture of the rapport function and continuing state of incipient talk) gave way to less interruption or fast talking that one might find with a conversation between two people not as familiar with one another. but in general, we are not fast talkers or habitual interrupters.

the biggest difference between oral conversation and written language was the body language and humor that i was not able to convey on paper. between two intimate people, i think there is probably more said through body language than through oral language, a tacit understanding without words that we have gathered throughout our time together. secondly, timing is everything. as much as i tried to convey a sense of delay by noting the pauses, there were certainly times when one of us would reply faster than other times or pause between two words in one thought. i was only able to capture the large gaps in time, which i would attribute to our eating more than think time. though there were moments of thought time. those nuances i am conjecturing at from actually partaking in the coversation, though an outsider listening to the same conversation might call some silences 'think time'.

the silent moments were interesting to me. had this been a conversation with a less intimate individual, the 14 second silence that i documented might have been uncomfortable, but i don't recall feeling awkward or noticing the silences until i replayed the conversation. in our case, silence is accepted.

if i did this again, i'd try two new things. first, i would video the conversation. and second, i would take the transcript and try to reenact it with nick to see how far or how close we might get to the original.