Interview Transcriptions - In Praise Of The En Dash

Reading an article or textbook about a particular subject usually means reading complete sentences, paragraphs with topic sentences, and facts neatly ordered in a logical progression. Reading a transcription of an interview is a completely different experience.
When asked a question, a cooperative interviewee will usually try to answer quickly and accurately. But frequently and almost everyone does this the interviewee will be uncertain of the answer, change his or her mind, go off on a tangent, or interrupt the dialog to begin a different sentence. It may seem to a beginning transcriptionist that the rules of grammar and syntax have literally flown out the window.
My early experience of transcribing was typing legal documents for an attorney. I typed correspondence, contracts, leases, complaints, interrogatories, requests for production of documents, subpoenas, jury instructions, deposition summaries, trusts, wills, powers of attorney, memoranda, and medical records summaries. While the attorney sometimes stopped mid-sentence to rethink a point or to back up the tape, he usually spoke in continuous, logical sentences going from Point A to Point B. After reviewing the rough draft, he dictated revisions, and the final transcription was a beautiful legal document that would hold up in court.
When I changed jobs and I transcribed my first interview, my supervisor instructed me to use the en dash (an old typesetters term, it is a dash that is roughly the width of an n) to indicate a break in a sentence the point where an interviewee starts a new thought or topic, returns to a previous point, or brings up a question to be explored. One might say that the completed sentence contains the first part of one sentence and a different part of another sentence. A simple example might be:
I attended the conference as a representative of the agency, but well, I wasnt officially a representative at that point. I was merely an observer.

Another case where the en dash is useful is when the interviewer interrupts the interviewee, and then the interviewee finishes the sentence he or she was speaking. An example:
Interviewee: The conference was held in
Interviewer: You mean the first conference?
Interviewee: London. Yes, the first conference was held in London.
The en dash a very useful item of punctuation can be used to provide a definition. It can also be used to introduce a summary statement after a list. Example: Health care, the environment, national security these are some of the topics to be discussed at the symposium.
A word of caution the en dash can be overused. If a comma is appropriate, then a comma should usually be the first choice of punctuation marks.
There is some disagreement between experts on whether the en dash or the em dash (slightly wider) should be used. There is also disagreement on whether there should be a space before and a space after the en dash or whether there should be no spaces. Each transcription provider must decide these things and be ready to accommodate client preferences.
As a transcriptionist, I do not know how I would cope without the en dash. People simply do not speak in grammatically perfect, neatly punctuated sentences. The en dash makes it possible to accurately transcribe the way people really do respond in an interview situation.