Other Details Involving Preparation of the Verbal Sample

• Partial words and stutters. Words such as "um" and "er" and "ah" are counted by the program then ignored for scoring.
• Non-verbal sounds. It is not necessary to type, for example, "(laughs)" or "(cries)" in samples to indicate non-verbal sounds. Such entries are not scorable and can bias the system. If you wish to include them, please set them off with braces {} as indicated in the preceding section.
• Pauses. It is not necessary to type "(pause)" or "(long pause)" to indicate gaps in verbal production. As with non-verbal sounds, please enclose them in braces if present.
• Unclear words. See the preceding section, Special Material within Samples, if the material is completely unintelligible.
• Word count. It is not necessary to count the number of words per verbal sample. The scoring program counts words and reports that count in the output record.
• Ellipses. As described earlier, PCAD 2000 identifies clause and sentence boundaries by looking for punctuation characters, including period (.), question mark (?), exclamation mark (!), and forward slash (/ -- for intra-sentence clause boundaries). Because these characters have special meaning, the use of ellipses (...) can confuse the program and should be avoided. Similarly, marking an end-of-sentence clause boundary with both a sentential punctuation mark (.?!) and a slash (as in "./" or "/?") should be avoided.
• Abbreviations. For the same punctuation-recognition reasons, occasional inaccuracies in recognizing abbreviations can occur. While these are usually minor, they can be avoided altogether by spelling out all abbreviated material.
• The number 1. For historical reasons, many typists are accustomed to using a lower case letter "l" to indicate the numeral "1", as, for example, in "l990". The scoring program distinguishes clearly between the two characters, and will not interpret a lower case "l" as the numeral "1". Since the scoring program converts all numerals to text word equivalents, the use of "l" in place of "1" should be avoided if possible.
• Whitespace. Whitespace is a term used to refer to blank characters, sequences of blanks, tabs, carriage returns, and page breaks, all of which affect the positioning of text on a page or screen, but which are not themselves visible. In general, the scoring program treats all whitespace identically. Thus, multiple spaces are the same as a single space. Indentation, page boundaries, and similar positioning which may be of assistance to the person preparing the sample is ignored by the program, and will not (usually) be reflected in the output report.
• "Funny" characters. Personal computers and word processing software are often capable of producing glyphs outside the normal range of text and punctuation (e.g. smiley faces, musical notes, line drawing characters). In general, the scoring program ignores such characters if they are present. However, unexpected and unusual combinations of such "funny" characters can cause problems, including unexpected program termination. Whenever possible, do not use characters outside the normal text, number, and punctuation range.
• Spell checking. Since the scoring program assumes correct spelling in the sample file, incorrect results may occur if words in the sample are misspelled. Most word processing programs come with a spell-checking option, and we advise that you use it to minimize problems with unknown and misspelled words.