Exhibitions: Resources for Curators of Library Exhibitions: Tips for Writing Scientific Labels

1. The caption should be geared toward a general audience: engaging, clear, and easy to understand. Pretend you’re talking to your favorite middle-schooler, or your favorite uncle who hasn’t taken a science class in a long time.

2. Don’t state the obvious. A good caption can inform viewers about things they might not know or see on their own. For example, instead of “This is a photo of a dog,” try, “This dog is a Swedish Vallhund, a rare breed known for athleticism.”

3. When you’re coming up with a description, ask yourself, “What excites me about this image/object/project/experiment?” Convey that enthusiasm.

4. Let your caption tell a miniature story.

5. Ask, “Why should the viewer care about my work?” Does it relate to health, the environment, a person or place someone knows, how something familiar or unfamiliar works, something in the news? It doesn’t need to have a practical application, but might offer insight into something foreign, or show why an everyday thing is more complicated than people believe, or question an assumption.

6. Take the perspective of someone who doesn’t know anything about the object. Answer those questions in your caption.

7. Avoid jargon. If you must use words like “gradient,” “phospholipid,” “scalable,” “substrate,” or “riparian,” explain what those terms mean.

8. Avoid acronyms and abbreviations. Some acronyms, such as DNA or NATO, are so well-known that you don’t need to spell them out, but a general audience won’t know MABL (marine atmospheric boundary layer) or MHD (magnetohydrodynamics). Likewise, spell out abbreviated units of measurement that might be unfamiliar: nanometers (not “nm”) or parts per billion (not “ppb”).

9. Use analogies to explain the unfamiliar. Here’s an example that won an Excellence in Exhibition Label Writing Competition Award in 2014 from the American Alliance of Museums: “The human genome is a 3-billion-part instruction manual written in the twisting, ladder-shaped molecule known as DNA. Despite its enormous size, your genome folds up so small that a copy fits inside every cell in your body.”

10. Write the caption as if you were talking face-to-face. You’re not writing to a formal audience of scientific peers, professors, or the editor of a scientific journal. You’re writing for a person who has decided to spend time with you and your work because of a story you have to tell. 11. DO tell a story but DON’T write a book. You must be able to let go of some information, no matter how detailed you want to be. Save that for your dissertation. To choose the most important points, pretend the caption is a Tweet and you only have 140 characters to get across what you want to say.