Notes from a Two-Hour Label Clinic
Last week I sat around a library table with six curators and collection managers from a regional history museum. Everyone had been asked to bring three labels they secretly hated from their own permanent galleries. Nobody had any trouble finding three.
What surprised the room was how similar the problems were across completely different departments. Archaeological ceramics, 19th-century guild banners, and postwar kitchen appliances were all suffering from the same four habits.
What we cut first
- The throat-clearing opener. Almost half the labels began by announcing that the object was "a fine example of" or "testifies to the rich tradition of." Cutting the first sentence completely improved eleven of the eighteen drafts on the spot.
- Catalogue language in standing shoes. Words like vernacular, syncretic, provenience, and polychromy are useful shorthand between specialists, and dead weight when someone is reading at a forty-five-degree angle under halogen spots.
- Biographical detours. Several captions spent fifty words on the birth, marriage, and municipal career of a workshop owner before mentioning what the object in the case actually did.
- Defensive hedging. Phrases such as "it may not be unreasonable to suggest" were replaced with plain statements of what is known and what remains a guess.
One label, two versions
My favorite rewrite of the afternoon belonged to a small tin lantern with punched star holes from 1840.
Before
The original wall label read:
Representing a typical utilitarian lighting device of the pre-industrial household, this pierced tinplate lantern exemplifies domestic sheet-metal craftsmanship while providing protection for a tallow candle against drafts during outdoor movement.
After
The curator who brought it looked at the tin cylinder for ten seconds, crossed out the entire paragraph, and wrote:
A punched tin lantern keeps a candle lit in the wind. The holes let a little light out and just enough air in—though on a dark yard path, it mostly helped other people see you.
Thirty words became thirty-six—longer, not shorter. But exemplifies and providing protection for turned back into verbs that actually do something, and for the first time all afternoon you could picture someone carrying the thing across a muddy courtyard.