A speech line starts at the first column of a line with a dollar sign ('$'), the speaker initial, a colon and a blank. It may consist of a single line, but often it turns out not to be sufficient for an entire utterance and therefore it may continue on a new line and thus consist of several rows. The requirement is that the representation of an utterance must not be discontinued by inserting information lines or speech lines representing utterances of other participants.
| (speech) | uncertain speech is enclosed in parentheses. |
| (...) | unintelligible speech is transcribed as three dots in parentheses. |
| / | a "short" pause; typically a "looking-for-the-right-word-pause"; |
| // | a "longer" pause; a short moment of reflection;a continuation is clearly expected. This symbol can also be used when one is uncertain about the duration of a pause; |
| /// | a "very long" pause; "speaker-associated silence";the floor is almost left free. |
| [n speech ]n | speech in the n:th overlap number n, uttered at the same time as everything else marked with the same index. |
| + | used to indicate a partly pronounced word, or when a speaker pauses, etc. within a word. |
A comment line should start with the symbol @ and the actual comment should be enclosed in angle brackets <>.
A section line begins with the character ยง, followed by a blank and any string which will be interpreted as the name of that section.
A time line starts with the character # and the time is given in the format HH:MM:SS (Hours:Minutes:Seconds).
An other information line begins with the symbol @.