1. When using spaces, use one space after the period.  People from old school typewriters have had it ingrained into their brain for years that double spacing after a period or any other punctuation at the end of the sentence is needed. With computers though, there is no need to compensate for spacing with the font typeface
2. Computers and word processors of our time period give us much more versatility to our spacing and using hard returns for paragraph breaks are completely unnecessary.  Let the software do the spacing for you.
3. Fewer fonts the better.  The rule of thumb should be to keep your font type down to two, maximum.  This provides for easier reading, easier on the eyes and more consistency.
4. Find out if your newsletter should have full justification or left read.  Full justification of text is considered more formal than left-justified so depending on your target audience and your intentions will depend on which one you might wish to use.
5. Centering text is used sparingly and in very few areas does it work well.  Using it with short lines or with your headings is a good place to start.
6. Line balance is important as providing squished text on one line but space leading that is larger on another line below it is bad form.  There are many ways to play with settings in software so that you can show  good balance and structure to the text at hand.
7. Cap usages has been overdone.  Using full caps on a line of text can be determined as ‘yelling’ from behind your keyboard.  Use caps appropriately and you will get your point across just as well as if you had capped the whole line of text.
8. Punctuation is always something that you should elementally use properly.  Use of proper punctuation can make a whole sentence change meaning or essentially make it easier reading.  Make sure your comma’s, quotes and other elements are used appropriately and consistently.

Get this… the normal human speaks English at approximately 140 words per minute. Most typists clock their skills in at about 60-70 words per minute. Some may be lucky to exceed that but what we are not taking into consideration is the characters that we don’t use in speech. Periods, question marks, quotes, and so much more. These can add up as well.

Most words used are averaged at 4.5 characters per word, that multiplied by the 140 words per minute in speech equals at whopping 630 characters per minute. Figure into that all the characters that typists need to include to make your projects English compliant (approximately 150 extra characters) and you will see 780 characters per minute that your transcriber puts to paper/computer screen.

Now, transcriptionists will type about 60 wpm and multiply that times the average length of a word at 4.5 and we see only a character amount of 270. This doesn’t include the punctuation which might equal around 50 extra characters in that. A total of 330 characters.

The ratio now is more than double of the spoken word vs the written word for each piece of audio we get. A normal transcriptionist will count on spending more than 2 minutes on each minute of transcription. Remember that next time you have a job that requires a quick turn around, your transcriber will appreciate it!