She is remembered for the methods and notational conventions she developed for transcribing speech, the latter forming the Jefferson Transcription System.
[2] Jefferson's work in conversation analysis began as a part of her coursework in a class she took in the spring of 1965 that was taught by Harvey Sacks.
This gave her the experience that allowed her to begin transcribing some of the recordings that served as the materials out of which Sacks’ earliest lectures were developed.
The Watergate tapes were composed of 22 transcripts of 37th President Richard Nixon's conversations with his lawyers and some of his closest staff members.
This final paper incorporated statistics taken from her transcriptions of the Watergate tapes, along with some of the dialogue she had with Harvey Sacks in her younger years.
[9] Over four decades, for the majority of which she held no university position and was unsalaried,[10] Jefferson’s research into talk-in-interaction has set the standard for what became known as CA.
It would not be so much true that her work was inter- or multi-disciplinary as that disciplinary boundaries were irrelevant to her enquiries into what Erving Goffman referred to as the “interaction order.”