Transcribing and annotating spoken texts is an activity that has been carried out for a long time not only within the corpus linguistics community but also by linguists interested in pragmatics, discourse and conversation. In these Guidelines, two major initiatives will be surveyed: the criteria developed by the Network of European Reference Corpora (NERC) and the Guidelines issued by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Before discussing these, a brief summary of the types of events that are usually represented when a spoken text is transcribed is presented. This is based on examination of transcription conventions found mainly in discourse and conversation analysis (Llisterri, 1994a).