Most of us are familiar with the its - it's and there - their errors but here are some less common ones that I've run into.
First, there's effect - affect. The hint that helped me most on this one is to remember that effect is almost always a noun and affect is almost always a verb.
Then there's punctuation of quotes. I often see transcript errors in that area. At the beginning of the quote, preceding the quote sign, there should be a comma. The first letter after the quote sign should be capitalized. The punctuation (usually a period or comma) at the end of the quote should be before the last quote sign. That has always looked funny to me but that's the way it is.
The word Internet is used in many transcripts. Should it be capitalized? I don't know. Many stylebooks and dictionaries say that the words "Internet" and "Web" (when referring to the World Wide Web) should always be capitalized because they're proper nouns. There is only one Internet and only one World Wide Web. But language referring to the Web is evolving and some people don't bother to capitalize internet or web thinking that they've become such common words that they should be in lower case. I think the important thing is to be consistent within one document. If you capitalize it at the start, make sure it's capitalized at the end.
How about words like email and website and so on? Should they be one word, two words, or hyphenated? Again, technical language is evolving. I like using one word for the sake of economy. I think the important thing here, too, is consistency.
Posted by bjs
