Faithfully reporting part of speech over a short period (8)
I believe the answer is:
verbatim
'faithfully' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'over a short period' is the wordplay.
'over' becomes 'verb' (I can't justify this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'short' means to remove the last letter.
'period' becomes 'time period' (period of time).
'time' with its last letter removed is 'tim'.
'verb'+'a'+'tim'='VERBATIM'
'reporting part of speech' acts as a link.
I am not very happy about this link. Some or all of it may belong to another bit of the clue.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for verbatim that I've seen before include "exact words" , "In exactly the words used" , "Faithfully copied" , "Exactly the same words for brave Tim" , "Using exactly the same words" .)