Museums Editing and Proofreading Services

A visitor stands in front of a case for eleven seconds. In that time they will read about forty words, and those forty words are the entire encounter between a lifetime of curatorial knowledge and a person who came in because it was raining. Almost every museum spends years on the object and an afternoon on the label.

We edit what museums produce — object labels and interpretive text, gallery panels and section introductions, exhibition catalogues and guides, audio and digital interpretation scripts, learning and family material, access and large-print versions, collections and acquisition documentation, and funding applications and reports. Our editors work on the writing that stands between a collection and its public.

The object label is the museum's most-read and least-loved piece of writing, and its failure is a caption written for a colleague. Forty words either give a visitor a reason to look, or send them to the next case. We work through these so the label answers the question the visitor is actually asking — what is it, why is it here, and what should I look at — since a label giving date, maker and accession number answers none of these; so it points at something visible in the object, because a visitor who is told where to look looks twice and a visitor given context looks away; so the one remarkable fact is chosen and everything else discarded, given that a label with four facts is a label with none; so the language assumes intelligence and no prior knowledge, as a visitor who meets an undefined term stops reading and does not resume; so the uncertainty is expressed honestly — probably, we think, nobody knows — since museums are trusted precisely when they admit what they do not know; so difficult histories are addressed in the label rather than in a panel elsewhere, because that is where the object is; so the reading level, line length and type size are worked out for someone standing up in low light; and so the label is read aloud before it is printed. Labels written this way make people stop.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including interpretation drafts, collections information and exhibition material. We are editors rather than curators, and we offer no view on attribution, interpretation or collections practice. What we can do is make forty words hold somebody's attention.