Most people think closed captioning is about typing fast. That is part of it, but it is not the hard part. The hard part is listening when your brain wants to slide past things. Listening when someone trails off. Listening when a sentence lands strangely and you have to decide whether that pause meant something or nothing at all. I do this for hours at a time, and the work has trained my attention in ways I did not expect.
I am a freelance closed-caption editor. I work alone, usually with headphones on, a waveform scrolling across my screen. Voices come at me in every tone you can imagine. Calm narrators. Rushed interviewees. People talking over each other. People who do not finish their thoughts. My job is not to clean that up. It is to capture what actually happened in a way that makes sense to someone reading it later.
Early on, I assumed accuracy meant focus. If I concentrated hard enough, stayed locked in, pushed through fatigue, the captions would be better. I treated attention like a muscle you just keep flexing. That worked for a while. Then mistakes started slipping in. Not big ones. Small ones. A word missed. A tone flattened. Meaning shifted just enough to matter.
Those errors bothered me more than obvious typos ever did. I knew why they happened, even if I did not want to admit it. I was tired. Not exhausted, just worn thin. Listening closely for long stretches does something strange to your mind. You stop hearing the spaces between words. You rush to fill them in.
I learned this the hard way on a long documentary project. Hours of interviews, recorded in different settings, with inconsistent audio quality. I pushed through it in long blocks, proud of my endurance. When I reviewed the captions later, I saw patterns. I had smoothed over hesitations. I had removed repetition that was actually meaningful. I had turned uncertainty into certainty without realizing it.
That was uncomfortable to see. It meant my idea of precision was flawed. I was accurate with words, but careless with meaning. That realization forced me to change how I worked. Not dramatically. Just enough.
I started building in pauses. Not breaks where I walked away completely, but moments where I stopped listening and reset. I replayed sections with fresh ears. I paid attention to my own internal pace. When I felt myself rushing, I slowed the playback instead of speeding it up. Those small changes reduced errors more than any speed trick ever had.
The work became more deliberate. I noticed more. Not just what was said, but how it was said. A sigh before an answer. A laugh that cut off too early. A long pause that meant hesitation, not silence. Capturing those moments felt like care, not perfectionism.
There is an anxiety that comes with this job that people do not talk about much. You are always worried you missed something. Always wondering if a caption shifted meaning without you catching it. That anxiety used to push me to work harder. Now it reminds me to work smarter.
Listening this closely also changed how I interacted with people outside of work. I noticed when conversations jumped ahead too quickly. When someone answered a question that had not quite been asked yet. I noticed my own habit of filling silence. The job trained me to sit with incomplete thoughts without rushing to resolve them.
Writing about this work helped me see those patterns more clearly. When I tried to describe what made a caption accurate, I kept returning to pacing. Not speed. Pacing. Knowing when to move forward and when to stay with a moment a little longer. That skill did not come naturally. It was learned through mistakes.
Being mildly anxious probably helped. I double-check things. I replay lines. I question my first instinct. That anxiety can be exhausting, but it also keeps me honest. The trick was learning not to let it drive the pace. When anxiety sped me up, quality dropped. When I acknowledged it and adjusted, the work improved.
This job is invisible most of the time. People only notice captions when they are wrong. That is fine. I am not looking for recognition. I care about getting it right in a way that respects the speaker and the reader. That respect shows up in small decisions. Do you keep the repetition? Do you mark the pause? Do you let the sentence trail off?
Those decisions require attention, but they also require rest. I learned that the hard way. Precision is not just about focus. It is about knowing when your focus needs support. Slowing down did not make me worse at my job. It made me more reliable.
That lesson continues to shape how I work. I do not chase speed anymore. I chase clarity. I trust that careful pacing will carry me through long projects better than brute force ever did. Listening closely is still demanding. It always will be. But now I understand that care shows up not just in what I hear, but in how I pace myself while hearing it.
Once I adjusted my pacing, I started noticing a different kind of strain. It was not just mental fatigue. It was the tension that came from holding too much in my head at once. Closed captioning requires you to listen, type, interpret, and anticipate all at the same time. When you rush, those layers collapse into each other. When you slow down slightly, they separate just enough to manage.
I used to try to remember entire sentences before typing them. I thought that would improve flow. In reality, it increased errors. By the time I reached the end of a sentence, the beginning had already shifted in my memory. I began working in smaller units. Phrases instead of paragraphs. Meaning instead of structure. That change felt inefficient at first. It turned out to be more accurate.
This approach made me more aware of how much meaning sits between words. People hesitate for reasons. They repeat themselves when they are searching for clarity. They change direction mid-sentence. Those moments matter. Flattening them makes the text easier to read, but it makes it less true. I had to decide which mattered more.
There is pressure in freelance work to move quickly. Faster turnaround means more jobs. More jobs mean stability. Slowing down felt risky. But the cost of errors was higher than the cost of pacing myself. Corrections took time. Revisions drained confidence. I learned to trust that careful work would lead to better outcomes over time.
I also started setting clearer boundaries with myself. I stopped working through fatigue just to hit arbitrary milestones. When my attention dipped, I paused. Sometimes that pause was five minutes. Sometimes it was longer. I learned to read my own signals. The work improved when I listened to them.
This shift required me to confront a belief I did not realize I held. That rest was a reward for finishing, not a tool for doing the work well. That belief had followed me from school into freelance life. Letting go of it felt uncomfortable. It also felt necessary.
Writing about this process helped me clarify why it mattered. When I tried to explain my work to others, I realized how often people equated care with effort. In my experience, care was about judgment. Knowing when to push and when to stop. That judgment came from paying attention, not from endurance.
I noticed similar patterns in other areas of my life. Conversations went better when I did not rush to respond. Tasks felt more manageable when I broke them into smaller pieces. Anxiety eased when I stopped trying to hold everything at once. The job taught me these things, but writing helped me recognize them.
There were still days when I misjudged my capacity. Projects that ran long. Audio that was harder than expected. On those days, I made mistakes. Instead of spiraling, I treated them as information. What did this error tell me about my pacing? What did it reveal about my limits? That mindset kept me from burning out.
Freelance work can be isolating. You do not have coworkers to check your assumptions. You do not have casual feedback. Writing became a way to test my thinking. To see if what I was noticing held up when put into words. It also reminded me that other people grappled with similar issues, even in different fields.
The longer I did this work, the more I trusted my process. Not because it was perfect, but because it was responsive. I adjusted when things shifted. I rested when attention faltered. I stayed close to the material without forcing it.
This balance is still something I work at. Precision demands care. Care demands pacing. And pacing requires you to listen not just to the audio, but to yourself. That lesson has made me better at my job and steadier in my work. It has also made me more patient, which I did not expect from a role built around speed and accuracy.
There is a moment late in the day when my ears start working harder than they should. I notice it because I replay the same sentence twice, then a third time, not because the audio is unclear but because my attention is thinning. Earlier in my career, I would push through that feeling. I told myself it was discipline. Now I recognize it as a warning.
When I ignore it, my captions drift. I make choices that look fine on the page but miss the shape of what was said. A pause turns into a clean sentence. A half-finished thought becomes decisive. Those are not neutral changes. They shift meaning. Seeing that pattern repeat forced me to accept that precision is not just about hearing everything. It is about hearing at the right pace.
I started building my workday around that reality. Shorter sessions. More deliberate stops. I no longer aim to finish a segment just because I am close. I stop when attention drops, even if it feels inconvenient. That choice has saved me time in the long run. Fewer corrections. Fewer second guesses. Less quiet panic when reviewing my own work.
This approach changed how I evaluate quality. I used to measure it by how much I completed in a day. Now I measure it by how little I have to fix later. That shift reduced my anxiety more than I expected. It gave me permission to trust a slower rhythm without feeling like I was falling behind.
I also became more thoughtful about how I learn from feedback. When a client flagged an issue, I stopped reacting defensively. I looked at where my pacing had slipped. Was I tired? Rushed? Distracted? Almost every mistake traced back to one of those states. Fixing the error mattered. Understanding why it happened mattered more.
While working through one particularly dense project, I found myself thinking about how useful it was to see how others handled revisions. Reading through a site that focused on feedback helped me reframe my own work. It reminded me that improvement comes from attention over time, not from pushing harder in one stretch. It helped me stay with the process instead of rushing to finish.
That perspective stuck. I stopped expecting my captions to be perfect on the first pass. I expected them to be honest. Honest about pauses. Honest about uncertainty. Honest about what was actually said. That expectation made revisions feel purposeful instead of corrective.
Listening closely for hours has trained me to respect limits. Not in a fragile way, but in a practical one. Precision requires rest as much as focus. When I honor that balance, the work holds together. When I ignore it, small errors multiply.
I am still mildly anxious. That has not changed. I still worry about missing things. But now that worry works alongside my process instead of driving it. It nudges me to slow down, not to speed up. It reminds me that care shows up in pacing.
Closed captioning will always demand attention. That is the job. What I have learned is that attention is not a constant state. It needs structure. It needs pauses. It needs respect. When I give it those things, the work becomes steadier and the meaning stays intact.
I do not think of slowing down as a retreat anymore. I think of it as maintenance. It keeps the work honest. It keeps me capable. And it lets me listen closely enough to hear what sits between the words, which is where the meaning usually lives.
Janelle Brooks, closed-caption editor
Top comments (0)