- ONLY 1 sentence per caption cel. DO NOT end one sentence and begin another in the same caption!!!
- Do not write “Cannot Understand.” Use “Unintelligible”.
- Include EVERY, um, ah, er, et cetera.
- Put a comma BEFORE AND AFTER every, um, ah, eh, etc.
- Spell out “et cetera” when used by the speaker.
- Write out the word “okay,” NOT OK.
- Spell out numbers 1-10 unless they are in a list.
- When writing numbers bigger than 10, then make all numbers numerals.
- Check whether your video player will use italics–many do not.
- Identifying a speaker gets its own line, when possible.
- Speaker identification is in parentheses (Jenna).
- Denote stuttering with hyphens and no space: T-t-t-today.
- Sound effects go in square brackets [woosh], and should be noted only if the sound effect is integral to the content.
- Use onomatopoeia for sounds “[machine gun firing] rat-a-tat-tat”.
- Write [applause] for an audience not [clapping], but if a single person is clapping, use it.
- Use ellipses for long pauses…within a sentence.
- Double check spelling, even that of the autogenerated captions as well as if someone else has done a first check of a file.
- Add a blank caption if there is a long space between sentences.
- If a quote is longer than one frame, “use open quotation marks for each continuous frame, then close the final frame.”
- Captions cannot be more than 2 lines each unless told otherwise.
- Left justify captions.
- Make sure there is a blank caption at the beginning and end of each video. This is dependent on the captioning program.
- Double check your own work!