Caring is part of interest. People get interested and keep reading because they
Caring is part of interest. People get interested and keep reading because they care. You can help people care about what they read by making it personal and emotional. Remember the picture of Anzac and Peggy? Part of what helped us care about what would happen to them is that the caption called them by name – human names. Reading about Anzac and Peggy is so much more personal than reading about a kangaroo and a wombat. Even though analysis is a lot of what we do in art museums, reading about it turns people off, it’s too impersonal. Consider this example:
There were 16.7 million cars registered in Australia in 2012, up 13.3% since 2007. As a result, cars killed millions of animals last year.
Anzac and Peggy need your help. Their mothers were killed by cars.
Which makes you care more? Making Anzac and Peggy’s story personal also makes it emotional. One of the ways this works is by addressing the reader directly.
For art museums, this means adopting an active voice. Don’t write “It interesting to note…” instead write “You might find it interesting…” You can create triggers to action by directly telling people where to look or what to do. “Look at the fleur-de-lis on the mast of the ship. They’re a symbol of France.” Don’t write “We’ve created an audio tour…” Instead write “You’ll enjoy listening to our audio tour.”
TIP!
To write in a more active voice, go through your text and remove the words “that” and “then” where ever you can. You’ll find that you don’t need to replace them, and removing them will then make your message more compact and your voice more active.
According to Grammar Girl[1] an active voice means that the subject of the sentence is doing the action: Kris loves museums. In the passive voice, the receiver of the action, museums receiving love, gets promoted to the subject position: Museums are loved by Kris.
The passive voice is usually harder to understand for the general population. But Grammar Girl notes: “An exception is that scientists are often encouraged to write in passive voice to lend their writing a sense of objectivity–to take themselves and their actions and opinions out of the experimental results.” Does this sound familiar? It should, because a lot of art historians write in the passive voice too.
The musical iconography of Cubism has often been the subject of general discussion. Only recently, however, has a picture of the artists’ musical inclination during the early Synthetic Cubism years begun to emerge. This expanded vision is based largely on the lettered names of composers and song title, and on the inclusion of collaged portions of sheet music found in many of these compositions.[2]
This kind of writing might be fine for art historians, but given to our visitors is it any wonder that many are surprised to hear about all the people who work in art museums? People want to hear from other people. We can make our museums and our writing more interesting by making it personal, from one person to another. This oft