TY  - JOUR
T1  - Transcribing encounters with the ‘wild’: The neglected case of the poetics of ordinary talk
A1  - Mlynar, Jakub
A1  - Rieser, Yeji
JA  - Qualitative Research
Y1  - 2025
UR  - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14687941251350878
M2  - doi: 10.1177/14687941251350878
KW  - conversation analysis
KW  - ethnomethodology
KW  - fieldwork
KW  - Gail Jefferson
KW  - Harvey Sacks
KW  - indifference
KW  - poetics
KW  - talk-in-interaction
KW  - transcription
KW  - wildness
N2  - ‘Poetics of ordinary talk’ covers a wide range of conversational phenomena including sound patterns, prosody, puns, and alliterations. Our paper focuses on the development of this topic pioneered by Harvey Sacks and later elaborated by Gail Jefferson, as well as its marginalisation in the contemporary landscape of qualitative research and EM/CA. Using published and archival resources, and focusing on transcription practices as a way of dealing with the ‘wildness’ of poetics, we aim to disentangle its relative neglect. We argue that the original recognition of poetics in talk-in-interaction was linked to Sacks’ specific attitude of indifference towards the possibility of seeing it in empirical materials, rather than an upfront rejection of it as improbable or implausible. We conclude by proposing that in addition to considering specific poetic phenomena, it might also be productive to view ‘poeticity’ as a ubiquitous and pervasive feature of all social life.
ER  -