The principal system of transcription used by conversation
analysis and discursive psychology was developed by Gail
Jefferson. It evolved side by side with, and informed by the
results of, interaction analysis. It highlights features of the
delivery of talk (overlap, delay, emphasis, volume and so on)
that have been found to be live in interaction. That is, they
are features of talk treated as relevant in one way or another
by the parties to the interaction. This is not the only system
of transcription available. Another well known system used in
some discourse analytic and ethnographic work was developed by
John Du Bois (1993). However, the Jeffersonian system has become
increasingly standard in the research literature (it is a
requirement, for instance, in articles published in Research in
Language and Social Interaction). Note that it is not ideal for
all kinds of analytic task. For example, it does not encode the
sort of features of speech delivery that a full phonetic
transcription does, so would not be