Open Forum

We write all of our labels for about a 4th grade reading level, with larger words either defined or concepts explained without using too large of words. I've found Beverly Serrell's book Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach incredibly useful as I took over signage on our grounds.

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Michelle Mileham
Director of Education
Tracy Aviary
Salt Lake City UT
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Michelle,

Beverly's book and work are certainly the gold standard for label writing. I would just like to add: adults accompanying children in museums rarely know more than their children about the topic on exhibit, so keep it simple is the best advice. In addition, if you listen to care givers try to explain a complicated concept from a label to a young child, the results are often not accurate--for example, gravity is like magnetism. I have found that families in outdoor settings are even less likely to read long labels than they are in indoor sites. So I recommend the old "less is more" strategy: if the label looks daunting, people will pass it by.

Another good resource for label writing is anything by Judy Rand. She wrote some incredible labels for the Monterey Bay Aquarium back in the day, so try to find anything by her ("The Visitors Bill of Rights" comes to mind).

And last but not least, try them out. It's called Formative Evaluation. Put some prototypes up and see which ones attract readers. I have found that including images or even embedded objects in a label attracts visitors more than a block of words.

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Ellen Giusti
Independent Consultant
New York NY
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-26-2017 10:48 AM
From: Michelle Mileham
Subject: Writing labels for children and families

We write all of our labels for about a 4th grade reading level, with larger words either defined or concepts explained without using too large of words. I've found Beverly Serrell's book Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach incredibly useful as I took over signage on our grounds.

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Michelle Mileham
Director of Education
Tracy Aviary
Salt Lake City UT
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I'm no longer in the label writing biz inside museums ;-) but I have some thoughts. I travel (domestically and internationally), spend a huge amount of time in all kinds of museums and read labels relentlessly. By and large I find labels to be poorly conceived and written in many ways. 

I have done considerable work as a freelance writer for education programs where readability software was part of the process. I learned a lot about the different programs and saw how very different a 5th grade text, for instance, could look depending on which software measured it as 5th grade. 

I also include label writing as part of my college art history teaching practice. Students do research on some work in a local museum (usually the Baltimore Museum of Art or the Walters Art Museum), do preliminary research on the artist and movement, write a detailed critical analysis of the work, and finally write a label for it (125-175 words). (Yes, I know that's a really long label, but these are youngsters and writing that kind of condensed language is a skill that takes a long time to refine.) I have found this process helpful in getting art history students to start asking the kinds of questions that nonprofessionals and museum visitors are likely to ask. 

So I guess my point is there, studying the several excellent publications that have been mentioned is a very good idea.

Finally, one last thing. A couple years ago we visited Austin TX and went to the Blanton Museum at UT (among others). They had something called the Blanton Poetry Project and poets were invited to produce ekphrasitic poems inspired by works in the collection. Many of those poems were posted next to the standard extended labels. The effect was marvelous and illuminating. I also use ekphrasis in the precollege workshop I teach to highschool students each summer. 

IIMO, the less a label talks about a work and the more it becomes a pathway into the work, the more I tend to like it.  Great conversation!

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Ellen Cutler
Adjunct Professor
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