'When your travelling at 30,000 feet, your probably not thinking about the people who have prepared the meals you will eat,' I read on a recent visit to the Heathrow Visitor Centre. Bad grammar might not be your bugbear, but for many people working in museums, the process of creating gallery text raises hackles and boils blood like nothing else.
Text is a powerful tool. It can excite visitors about unfamiliar objects and ideas, call an audience to action, or create new connections between people and places. But text often fails - too wordy, too worthy or too woolly to do its job of communicating. Where do things go wrong?
Successful exhibitions are developed with a specific audience in mind. But it's easy to find displays that try to appeal to several audiences with conflicting needs - resulting in text that's frustrating for all.
The Coventry Transport Museum has a typical problem - how to appeal to well-informed enthusiasts, as well as families and school groups. The museum unveiled an object-rich new motorcycle gallery in April 2006, incorporating an evocative series of motorcycle film clips.
But the gallery text doesn't live up to the initial fireworks. A series of 'Did-you-know?' text interventions often errs on the too-technical side: I was mystified by a panel saying that the Newmount Trading Co, based at Warwick Row in Coventry, sold Newmount motor-cycles that were actually re-badged German Zundapp machines. Hooray? Boo? And some panels seem to have had all the life edited out of them - in one case, expending 86 words under a heading Around the World to tell us little more than the fact that people used motorcycles to travel abroad. A statistic or two or a story about an epic journey would lift it.
There's no excuse for text that wastes words. We're now dealing with a generation used to services such as the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in which high-quality, snappy information, hierarchically arranged, is on offer 24 hours a day. Readers aren't lazy, they just expect museums to provide them with all that - and more.
In the environment of a gallery, research shows that adults have a reading age of about 12 and can absorb information best if it's 'chunked' into paragraphs consisting of two or three sentences. When adults are visiting with children, they're looking for text they can scan quickly and use to provide an explanation.
The National Maritime Museum Cornwall provides text that gives parents plenty to tell their offspring. In the Tidal Zone gallery (pictured above), text that accompanies imagery of a natural Cornish delicacy reads: 'With red eyes and a threatening wave of his claws, the swimming crab can see off most of his attackers except humans.'
Text should meet visitors' needs. So who should write those words on the walls? Curatorial staff may feel their expert voice is of most value to the audience, but colleagues in the education, interpretation or editorial teams often have greater experience of the audience's knowledge and reading habits. And in practice, visitors assume that text reflects the view of the whole institution - not an individual expert. So there's much to gain by making text-writing a team effort.
But this approach will only work if everyone in the team is clear about the message the exhibition intends to communicate. Where the developers of a display aren't clear about the message - or are unwilling to shed the cloak of curatorial cleverness to reveal it - the visitors suffer.
For example, The Uncertain States of America at the Serpentine Gallery in London left me amused, but confused. A single introductory panel listed the artists in the show but gave sparse insight into why they'd been chosen. One baffling line indicated that perhaps the show's own curators had struggled to pinpoint a theme, explaining that the works 'opened a decisive window onto [America's] diverse cultural activities - activities that are at times challenging to decipher but important to contemplate'.
By contrast, every fibre of the Eden Project resonates with a message about conservation and sustainability. What's the link between crisps and orang-utans? asks a label. The answer - that unsustainable palm-oil production threatens the animals' habitat - is reinforced by the site plan, the restaurant and shop.
How can we write better text? A recent exhibition at the esteemed Royal Geographical Society opened on a Tusday [sic], with free admision [sic], according to the poster outside. It's an editor or proof-reader's job to pick up the howlers that will put off many visitors.
Rhetorical questions, statistics or anecdotes can help to spice up dull label text. In its recent Visiting Picasso exhibition, the Falmouth Art Gallery incorporated quotations from family visitors in its multi-coloured labels.
Text interventions can revitalise permanent galleries. Visitor-tracking at the Science Museum's flagship gallery, Making the Modern World, showed that people didn't realise they were surrounded by some of the nation's greatest technological treasures. Simple lines of large-format text added to existing plinths soon tackled the problem.
A useful book, Saying it Differently by Tim Gardom Associates (2006), shows how a group of London museums worked on redisplaying their galleries with a focus on their audiences.
To inspire new thinking, try using techniques from other media. It's the writing team's responsibility to communicate in such a way that visitors keep reading. By sacrificing ownership of text to a desire to communicate successfully, everyone can write better text that meets visitors' needs.
Rebecca Mileham is a consultant on text in museums: www.textworkshop.co.uk
Free copies of Saying it Differently, by Alison Grey, Tim Gardom and Catherine Booth, are available from Louise Doughty at ldoughty@museumoflondon.org.uk or as a pdf from the Museums, Libraries and Archives London, www.mlalondon.org.uk
Text is a powerful tool. It can excite visitors about unfamiliar objects and ideas, call an audience to action, or create new connections between people and places. But text often fails - too wordy, too worthy or too woolly to do its job of communicating. Where do things go wrong?
Successful exhibitions are developed with a specific audience in mind. But it's easy to find displays that try to appeal to several audiences with conflicting needs - resulting in text that's frustrating for all.
The Coventry Transport Museum has a typical problem - how to appeal to well-informed enthusiasts, as well as families and school groups. The museum unveiled an object-rich new motorcycle gallery in April 2006, incorporating an evocative series of motorcycle film clips.
But the gallery text doesn't live up to the initial fireworks. A series of 'Did-you-know?' text interventions often errs on the too-technical side: I was mystified by a panel saying that the Newmount Trading Co, based at Warwick Row in Coventry, sold Newmount motor-cycles that were actually re-badged German Zundapp machines. Hooray? Boo? And some panels seem to have had all the life edited out of them - in one case, expending 86 words under a heading Around the World to tell us little more than the fact that people used motorcycles to travel abroad. A statistic or two or a story about an epic journey would lift it.
There's no excuse for text that wastes words. We're now dealing with a generation used to services such as the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in which high-quality, snappy information, hierarchically arranged, is on offer 24 hours a day. Readers aren't lazy, they just expect museums to provide them with all that - and more.
In the environment of a gallery, research shows that adults have a reading age of about 12 and can absorb information best if it's 'chunked' into paragraphs consisting of two or three sentences. When adults are visiting with children, they're looking for text they can scan quickly and use to provide an explanation.
The National Maritime Museum Cornwall provides text that gives parents plenty to tell their offspring. In the Tidal Zone gallery (pictured above), text that accompanies imagery of a natural Cornish delicacy reads: 'With red eyes and a threatening wave of his claws, the swimming crab can see off most of his attackers except humans.'
Text should meet visitors' needs. So who should write those words on the walls? Curatorial staff may feel their expert voice is of most value to the audience, but colleagues in the education, interpretation or editorial teams often have greater experience of the audience's knowledge and reading habits. And in practice, visitors assume that text reflects the view of the whole institution - not an individual expert. So there's much to gain by making text-writing a team effort.
But this approach will only work if everyone in the team is clear about the message the exhibition intends to communicate. Where the developers of a display aren't clear about the message - or are unwilling to shed the cloak of curatorial cleverness to reveal it - the visitors suffer.
For example, The Uncertain States of America at the Serpentine Gallery in London left me amused, but confused. A single introductory panel listed the artists in the show but gave sparse insight into why they'd been chosen. One baffling line indicated that perhaps the show's own curators had struggled to pinpoint a theme, explaining that the works 'opened a decisive window onto [America's] diverse cultural activities - activities that are at times challenging to decipher but important to contemplate'.
By contrast, every fibre of the Eden Project resonates with a message about conservation and sustainability. What's the link between crisps and orang-utans? asks a label. The answer - that unsustainable palm-oil production threatens the animals' habitat - is reinforced by the site plan, the restaurant and shop.
How can we write better text? A recent exhibition at the esteemed Royal Geographical Society opened on a Tusday [sic], with free admision [sic], according to the poster outside. It's an editor or proof-reader's job to pick up the howlers that will put off many visitors.
Rhetorical questions, statistics or anecdotes can help to spice up dull label text. In its recent Visiting Picasso exhibition, the Falmouth Art Gallery incorporated quotations from family visitors in its multi-coloured labels.
Text interventions can revitalise permanent galleries. Visitor-tracking at the Science Museum's flagship gallery, Making the Modern World, showed that people didn't realise they were surrounded by some of the nation's greatest technological treasures. Simple lines of large-format text added to existing plinths soon tackled the problem.
A useful book, Saying it Differently by Tim Gardom Associates (2006), shows how a group of London museums worked on redisplaying their galleries with a focus on their audiences.
To inspire new thinking, try using techniques from other media. It's the writing team's responsibility to communicate in such a way that visitors keep reading. By sacrificing ownership of text to a desire to communicate successfully, everyone can write better text that meets visitors' needs.
Rebecca Mileham is a consultant on text in museums: www.textworkshop.co.uk
Free copies of Saying it Differently, by Alison Grey, Tim Gardom and Catherine Booth, are available from Louise Doughty at ldoughty@museumoflondon.org.uk or as a pdf from the Museums, Libraries and Archives London, www.mlalondon.org.uk
