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Reading Sounds

The Ultimate User's Guide to Closed Captioning

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A screenshot from Blade Runner featuring a bustling street scene at night and the caption: AUTOMATED VOICE: Cross now. Cross now.

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Cover of Reading Sounds by Sean Zdenek, University of Chicago Press, 2015

Winner: 2017 Best Book in Technical and Scientific Communication, Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)

"There’s no book like this; plain and simple, it is one of the most original new books I’ve ever read." -- Brenda Brueggemann, author of Deaf Subjects

Supplemental website

  • Preface
  • 1. A rhetorical view of captioning
  • 2. Reading and writing captions
  • 3. Context and subjectivity in sound effects captioning
  • 4. Logocentrism
  • 5. Captioned irony
  • 6. Captioned silences and ambient sounds
  • 7. Cultural literacy, sonic allusions, and series awareness
  • 8. In a manner of speaking
  • 9. The future of closed captioning
  • Fair Use notice
  • Accessibility statement

Recent blog posts

  • Caption every screen. March 22, 2020
  • Positioning and styling captions when speakers overlap and interrupt each other March 20, 2020
  • Cripping closed captioning: Experiments with type, icons, and dynamic effects August 6, 2016
  • Chirp! Captioning BB-8 in The Force Awakens April 14, 2016
  • Do sirens always wail? January 7, 2016
  • When a yellow subtitle meets a character from The Simpsons December 18, 2015
  • Tracking sonic timelines in closed captioning October 18, 2015

Buy the Book

Reading Sounds is published in hardcover, paperback, and e-book by The University of Chicago Press (2015). This supplemental website includes all of the media clips discussed in the book.

Purchase your copy today.

About the Author

Dr. Sean Zdenek is associate professor of technical and professional writing at the University of Delaware. He has been keenly interested in closed captioning for over a decade and writing about it since 2009. Send him an email (seanzdenek@gmail.com) or follow him on Mastodon (seanzdenek@union.place).

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