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Style Guidelines

Style guideline sample courtesy of DCMP

Like newspapers, magazines, or any other published product, good captions follow a style guide. If you plan to produce more than a few captioned videos, a consistent style will go a long way to adding polish, readability, and clarity to your captions.

Common style conventions include:

All capital letters vs. mixed, or sentence case (mixed case is the preferred style for web work)
Limit of lines of text per screen (usually two or three)
Whether to spell out numbers
Whether to italicize foreign words
When to wrap text to the next line (not in the middle of a prepositional phrase, for example)

The Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP), funded by the US Department of Education, has published a “Captioning Key” that serves as a good baseline for captioning style guides. See the Resources section for more information.