Oral History Workshop – 12

Editing

Shahed Yazdan
Translated by M. B. Khoshnevisan

2023-2-21

The oral history website is going to provide the educational materials of some oral history workshops to the audience in written form. The present series has been prepared using the materials of one of these workshops. As you will see, many of the provided contents are not original or less said contents, but we have tried to provide categorized contents so that they can be used more.

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Editing

After we decided to do the work by keeping the questions or removing them, we must use punctuation marks in our text to make the text "easy-to-read". We put dots, commas, question marks or exclamation marks and the likes in the places of the text where it is necessary.

Note: The principle is that the sentences should be as short as possible.

After placing punctuation marks, we use prepositions such as "from", "with", "in", "that" and other such things to make the text "goo-to-read".

So far, we have not changed the original text and have only made it easy-to-read and good-to-read.

In the next step, if necessary, we move the sentences and change their order to obtain a good form of the text. At this stage, we do not remove or add a sentence, but we may just change the order of the sentences depending on the need.

Then we add explanations and clarifications of ambiguous points that were written before in the form of footnotes to the main text to complete the first chapter; after that, we do the same for the rest of the chapters of the book.

Be sure that at this stage, you also need to refer to the narrator and ask him or her ambiguous things.

Spoken or written tone

Spoken tone or broken writing style is the words that the narrator says literally, for example, he says "I'm going" or "we went" while he means "I went". On the other hand, there is written language style, which turns the narrator's speech into writing and replaces the word "I am going" with a slang word like "I'm gonna".

Currently, it is customary to convert the spoken tone into a written one, except in direct quotations. In a direct quotation, the tone of speech must be placed inside an open and closed quotation mark; For example: "He said to me: Mammad, let's go."

In late sacred defense period, a number of oral history books were published about the war, which had been edited in broken writing style; but the Academy of Persian Language and Literature found fault with it due to the deviation in the Persian language, and gradually, it made them go more towards writing in written language style. At the same time, everyone agrees that wherever there is a direct quotation, it should be written in broken written style.

In direct quotation, if the sentence is in another language, it should be cited in the exact form and its translation should be written in the footnote. Even if a person mispronounced a word, it should be written in the same way as it was said, and if an explanation is needed, it should be mentioned in the footnote.