If you are looking for Thornburg Proofreading, LLC, you have been redirected here because I have moved and changed business names! My new business name is Thornburg Writing and Editing, LLC.

Please update your website bookmarks to www.thornburgwande.com, and change your contact email for me to thornburgwritingandediting@gmail.com.

A smiling woman with short-cropped brown-blond hair in front of some greenery wearing a white shirt with flowers on it and red plastic-rimmed glasses.My name is Darcy Ann Smittenaar Thornburg, and I offer scoping and proofreading services.

I love the written word, and enjoy it even more when it is coherent and the meaning of a piece is clear. It is this aspect of language that I have chosen to focus on–keeping the meaning of a text coherent and readable.

I currently hold an associate’s degree in English literature and a bachelor’s degree in applied linguistics, and I have taken 18 credits toward a master’s degree in historical linguistics since the fall of 2017. I specialize in scoping and proofreading transcripts for court reporters and stenographers.

As a scopist, I work with these professionals to . . .

  • EDIT transcripts, with or without audio backup, to create a record from translated stenographic notes in Stenograph’s Case CATalyst, Advantage’s Eclipse, or Stenovations’ DigitalCAT.
  • BUILD a translation dictionary to make translation smoother as more records are produced.
  • SUGGEST briefs and strokes to improve writing efficiency.
  • GIVE technical support, including auto-indexing, include files, and more.
  • RESEARCH names and addresses of people, places, and entities, to ensure proper spelling, capitalization, and factual data.
  • PUNCTUATE the record of the spoken word so that it retains its proper meaning while following the reporter’s preferred punctuation rules reference.
  • TRANSLATE stenographic notes which have not been translated by the CAT software.
  • CORRECT mistranslated words and/or phrases.
  • MAKE a transcript as close to turn-in ready as possible, so that the reporter does not have to go “off book” to edit their own work.
  • ENSURE that all factual information (names, addresses, etc.) is correct.

As a proofreader, I can . . .

  • FIND typographic and stenographic errors in their transcripts, such as misspellings, transposed words, usage of the wrong homonyms/homophones, etc.
  • SPOT inconsistencies in transcript formatting, and apply the state’s, county’s, city’s, or agency’s formatting rules to each transcript.
  • CORRECT punctuation or suggest punctuation which better reflects a given speaker’s meaning.
  • SUGGEST words and phrases that may not have been properly understood when the reporter created the transcript. Example: The reporter may have heard “bunch housing,” but the judge probably said “Munchausen.”
  • RESOLVE inconsistencies in transcript text, such as matching page numbers in the index of exhibits to the page numbers on which the exhibits were first introduced.
  • PROVIDE the proper spelling and/or usage of legal, medical, and other terms, according to the context of each transcript.

Get an Edition 2 Bullet Journal notebook for $29.95 (affiliate link).