Karl Fredal: Is Captioning an Art or a Skill? 
[Articulating Betweenity]
Captioning CODA
Karl Fredal: Is Captioning an Art or a Skill?
In his classical text on the art of rhetoric, Aristotle too must try to determine where rhetoric lies in the shifting sands between art and skill. Here Karl plays in that same sand with captioning. First, he leans toward the skill set answer—considering the way in which captioning must be learned and applied with a method and how the captioner (of other’s words) doesn’t necessarily have full creative license (“that’s what your own writing is for,” he quips). But then toggling back, he (creatively) calls up a scenario where four different people might be asked to caption just one video and they would surely all create four different kinds of captioned texts. In the end, Karl skillfully and artfully offers a between—and relational—answer: “Captioning is a skill that we can apply our creative liberty to.”
There are several things that strike me as significant about Karl’s definition. First, that other terms we associate with literate processes, products, and practices could easily substitute for “captioning”: Writing is a skill that we can apply our creative liberty to; Reading is a skill that we can apply our creative liberty to; Listening is a skill that we can apply our creative liberty to; Speaking is a skill that we can apply our creative liberty to…. Thus, captioning joins in the chorus as a literate practice and process. Second, I note that here in the moment of summary definition, Karl has shifted out of the predominant use of second person pronoun throughout this narrative (“you”)—peppered with moments of his own personal narrative (“I”)—into the grand and inclusive “we” and “our”: Captioning is a skill that we can apply our creative liberty to. In this pronoun shift, he also makes captioning akin to its sibling literate acts since reading, writing, listening, speaking are often posited as solo processes tied to individual products… even though they are actually social, interpretive, relational acts that we are always already negotiating between.
