- ONLY one sentence per caption cell. DO NOT end one sentence and begin another in the same caption!
- Do not write [cannot understand.] Use [unintelligible].
- Include EVERY um, ah, er, etc.
- 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, E.G., “9, 10, 11,” not “nine, ten, 11.”
- 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 [clapping].
- 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 pause between sentences.
- If a quote runs longer than one caption cell, “use open quotation marks for each continuous frame, then close the final frame.”
- Captions cannot be more than two 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!