This oversight is a result of the common practice among public defenders (and their consultants) of drawing on the defense strategy that appears most promising, regardless of the client's own wishes. The client is thus stripped of her or his agency, becoming an object in an interaction controlled by attorneys and judges.

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- The client's words and what they experience seem to become the object, and the material that is encoded

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Because we all bring our subjectivity to the task of transcription, it may be impossible to come to agreement that one version is ultimately 'correct'.

- Because of the tone of speech, the wording and other elements, different people looking at the same sentence will have different interpretations, and only the original creator will know what they intended.

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Noticing these inconsistencies, I contacted the newspaper's copy editor to discover what principle, if any, was guiding the transcription process. The editor assured me that when sources use 'broken English' the newspaper staff attempts to 'turn it into the best English possible'. Yet this prescriptive attitude has not extended to JM's use of nonstandard forms like ain't. It seems that the transcriber followed two sometimes contradictory principles: (1) Standardize nonstandard English (especially by replacing 'missing' forms); but (2) Preserve the 'flavor' of the original speech. Nonstandard forms are sprinkled through the text much as they might be scattered through the dialogue of a novel: not to systematically describe a linguistic variety but to evoke a character, in this case the simple, plain-talking man on the street.

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- It makes me think of translations and conversions in different languages, which surely cannot be translated 100% perfectly, and this conversion into the best English also means that the core of the expression of a sentence will be converted, somehow a conversion of the soul.