Collecting Slips

• Carry a notebook and write down what you hear imediately. You'll be amazed at how fast the exact memory of a slip fades from your mind. How many times have I said: "That was so amazing: I'll never forget that as long as I live," only to realize as little as ten minutes later that I have no longer any clear notion of what was said?
• Write down target and utterance. Don't assume you will always know what the speaker's intention was. You'll for get that, too. You really will.
• Develop some conventions and be consistent. How about these:
  • U = Utterance: what the speaker said.
  • T = Target: What the speaker intended to say.
  • D/T = Date/Time. Seems silly at first but it's often handy later on.
  • NB or N = Note: about what was going on or clarifying info about pronunciation of the utterance. See Below.
• Errors with sounds can be problematic to record, especially if they create nonsense words like this one did:
  • Utterance: Don't fake your shinger at me.
    Target: Don't shake your finger at me.
    Does 'shinger' rhyme with 'finger' or with 'ringer' ('Finger' has a clearly pronounced 'g' sound; 'ringer' in most varieties of English, does not)?
  To avoid this kind of confusion, either learn to transcribe phonetically in some standardized form or write down a few reminders about pronunciation like this:
  • Utterance: Don't fake your shinger at me.
    Target: Don't shake your finger at me.
    Just the consonants switched. Rhymes with finger.
• Be circumspect. It's clear to us as linguists that speech errors are simple failures of a usually highly accurate, highly automated speech production system. They reveal nothing about character, intelligence, education or even overall articulateness of the person who uttered the slip. That, however, is not widely understood. So, if you are recording other people's errors, write them down quietly and keep a civil (rather than gleeful) look on your face if at all possible.
• Commit. Don't casually write down just the errors that strike your fancy. That leads to a collection of only fancy errors. Commit to, for a period of time, writing down every error you hear. This way, you'll get an accurate reflection of what's really going on.
• Some errors are corrected. Some are not. Write down the whole shebang: whatever the person said whether or not s/he tried to correct it.
• Write down the context for the error. It is not necessary, for example, to write down that cousin Fred was standing in the kitchen peeling potatoes when he said that crazy thing about the aliens and the peanut butter. It's not necessary, but later on you'll want to remember the scene and jotting down a few details such as time of day and what everyone was doing will help you to reconstruct it.
• When in doubt, do. It's sometimes hard to know immediately if the utterance that caught your attention is really an error. To be honest, the line between error and just 'weird thing to say' is a fuzzy one. Sometimes, I say things that, even though I said it myself, I can't really decide if it's an error. ... Take for example that last sentence: was it a production error or just plain bad writing?
• If you miss one, don't panic. Nobody's perfect. As soon as you realize you're forgetting one, reconstruct what you can of the utterance including your best sense of what the category was and move on. You won't get them all, but you can come close to getting them all.

Have a look at a sample of errors I've recorded.