Thread:Jiskran/@comment-25862208-20150406013439/@comment-5137743-20150406090858

Grimmaniac, your first idea, with dashes, is the traditional way to transcribe such as diary entries when the text becomes illegible. However, for clarity and to avoid endless debate and amendments, it might be safer to skip the words which are unclear, so that (hopefully) other users are less tempted to put it right. Either way, it might well be worth stating and setting out somewhere in the policies pages here your final approach. PDXBlazer and I were discussing, a couple of months ago, the placement of quotation marks, although it seems the US and British usages differ here. To me, only those pieces of punctuation in the original form belong inside the inverted commas, but current American usage seems to include commas or full stop where they mark the end of a clause or sentence. In short, I believe most approaches to the matter of transcription can work well, as long as you are consistent, and your specific style is clearly explained.