Writers in cultural institutions are responsible for creating clear, concise texts that connect audiences to their collections, displays and programmes. Their readers vary widely in age, reading level, cultural awareness and knowledge. Developing texts in consideration of readers’ needs and abilities is essential for organisations dedicated to bringing art, history and culture to a wide range of audiences. They are also an opportunity for cultural institutions to put their values and mission into practice, by supporting inclusive access and public benefit.
In large cultural institutions, audience-facing communications are produced by multiple departments. Variations in staff specialisms and skills can make it difficult to create consistent, clear and inclusive texts. Although many organisations have style guides that outline their rules for audience-facing text, these are often long and complex documents that primarily seek to produce visually accessible and academically consistent text. Most research around written communication in museums focuses on specific kinds of texts, such as social media posts and newsletters, or wall labels, exhibition and catalogue texts, but none have produced a singular tool to standardise written communications across departments within an organisation that also addresses additional barriers to content.
In response to this need, I developed a research-based rubric that writers in cultural institutions can use to standardise a variety of audience-facing texts. This rubric gives writers a flexible tool to align texts with their organisation’s mission and inclusion goals and increase engagement with audiences through text that is culturally sensitive, accessible, clear, trauma-informed and reflective of the organisation’s values. The rubric offers multiple lenses through which writers can inform what and how they write.
My experiences in teaching and instruction in the United States guided the development of this rubric. Rubrics are used in teaching to set clear standards for student work and diminish the probability of biased scoring. Working as an instructional designer I learned that impactful planning and design considers the audience – their learning conditions, prior knowledge and what skills they need to reach their goals. This influenced the way I experienced learning interactions, particularly in cultural institutions. During my most recent studies in museums and audience engagement, I participated in critical conversations with writers working across the cultural sector about the perceived gaps between their organisations and their audiences. These experiences became the lens through which I began ideating ways to address this gap.
How text functions in cultural institutions
Writers play an important part in cultural institutions because the words they use and the order in which they write them effects how they are understood by audiences. The linguist Louise J. Ravelli emphasises the importance of communication in museums, where its sole objective is to shape readers’ understanding.1 Aware of the responsibility and power that writing holds, the museum interpretation specialists Susan Spero and Katherine Whitney assert that writers in cultural institutions should consider this power in representing their institution, as well as in shaping meaning for their audiences.2
Standardisation across departments for audience-facing texts unifies an organisation’s messaging, building trust in the institution and making its direction clear. Professionals in cultural institutions come with a variety of experiences, types of education, and skill sets. These variations can present a challenge to standardising texts across departments, because approaches to writing among staff will vary. As Ravelli suggests, ‘communication is not a straightforward or transparent phenomenon: it takes a complex range of skills for either an individual or an institution to be an effective communicator, and there can be debates and contestations over both what should be communicated, and how.’3 Using consistent writing tools and guides can support standardisation of these messages across departments and result in a unified message from the institution to its audience.
Cultural institutions often use style and language guides to shape written text around the institution’s policies, mission, vision and values.4 However, style guides tend to focus mainly on a text’s visual accessibility – the text’s size, location and contrast – and lack consideration of other audience needs like context and relevance of the subject. Language guides are most often used in direct conjunction with curation processes, lacking effective universal application in other written communications such as maps, newsletters and press releases. There is a need for a tool that is both universal, to ensure written text meets institutional standards and goals; flexible, to ensure it meets departmental standards and goals; and audience centred.
Developing the rubric
Research to develop the rubric was carried out in a variety of institutions and subjects, including museums, libraries, community centres and art collectives. I analysed over one hundred samples of wall text, press releases, gallery guides, artist statements, maps and informational brochures from cultural institutions located between North Carolina and New York. Initially, I noted the aspects I thought were missing from each text, then used these missing aspects to guide the creation of the rubric’s nine focus areas: accessibility, alignment, clarity, context, perspective, readability, reference/reverence, trauma-informed and voice/tone. As I began to research and define success markers for each area, I adapted the ‘Good, Better, Best’ guiding scale and descriptions to help writers think critically about how their texts may impact audiences, as opposed to giving direct instruction on what and how to write.
The rubric was finalised through an iterative research process that included collaboration with curators, programme directors and museum educators working in ethnographic, history and art museums. Their insight on institutional and departmental writing goals further informed the focus areas, and the rubric’s efficacy in shaping how professionals approach writing for their audiences. Drawing on guidance from writing and style guides from organisations like the American Alliance of Museums and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as guidance on writing about violence and trauma from writers including Dominick LaCapra and Keely Maddock, the rubric is designed for use in every department, for every type of audience-facing communication.5
Rubric focus areas
Accessibility
Fig.1: Guiding scales for ‘Accessibility’ focus area, ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric
Most cultural institutions have their own accessibility guidelines that govern fonts, text contrast and reading level for audience-facing texts. The ‘Accessibility’ focus area of the ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric builds on this foundation, extending it to consider differences in sight and languages among readers, since widening the ways readers can access text increases their engagement with it. The Bilingual Exhibits Research Initiative found that labels in Spanish and English helped Spanish-speaking parents navigate museum visits with their children – giving instructions, keeping up with the group and feeling more confident in the space.6 Bilingual speakers moved fluidly between languages, creating a richer, more socially dynamic experience of the exhibition.7 Accessibility can reach even further: many museums now use symbols and icons alongside text to support visitors for whom language, vision, learning disabilities, or other cognitive factors make reading difficult.8 Identifying which parts of an institution’s audience face the greatest barriers to access can help writers raise their organisation’s accessibility standards, working toward content and collections that are genuinely free from barriers (fig.1).
Alignment
Fig.2: Guiding scales for ‘Alignment’ focus area, ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric
While alignment is often discussed in marketing to convey a unified institutional message, aligning audience-facing text with an institution’s mission is just as central to that goal. The language the institution chooses reflects its attitudes towards the subject, the creator and the reader. Writers should look to the organisation’s mission, vision and values to determine their audience and goals. Text that exemplifies these speaks to its intended audience through the institution’s guidelines for grammar, punctuation, capitalisation, spelling, person and formality. The alignment focus area standardises the messaging audiences receive, building the base on which writers build audience-facing text (fig.2).
Clarity
Fig.3: Guiding scales for ‘Clarity’ focus area, ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric
Nearly 30% of US adults are ‘low-skilled’ in literacy. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines low-skilled adults as those without the skills to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences.9 Written text is also more complex and lexically dense than spoken text, so some visitors will have difficulty understanding long paragraphs, complex sentences and unfamiliar words.10 Many cultural institutions, shaped by their histories of exclusionary ‘high culture’, struggle to widen the reach of their text, creating a sort of cultural barrier to writing texts that reach an increasing variety of visitor types.11 However, writing clearly does not have to mean oversimplifying or under-explaining a subject – it means organising the most important information efficiently, so that it is easier to take in.12 Clear and concise writing reaches audiences (fig.3).13
Context
Fig.4: Guiding scales for ‘Context’ focus area, ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric
Contextual information gives readers the knowledge they need to understand a text, providing an ‘entry point’ from which readers can approach an exhibition or programme.14 Context is directly tied to a text’s impact; rather than assuming knowledge of a particular subject, effective writing supplies it.15 Providing context effectively relies on an understanding of audiences and what they bring to their engagement with the subject. Text that successfully provides context defines potentially unfamiliar terms and uses language authentic to the subject, bridging the gap between what the text assumes and what readers already know (fig.4).
Perspective
Fig.5: Guiding scales for ‘Perspective’ focus area, ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric
The perspectives writers choose to include can signal whose voice an organisation considers important. Including the perspectives of the people related to the subject is a growing practice across the landscape of cultural institutions. Writers must understand how their own perspectives shape the stories they tell: as Ravelli argues, what counts as an ‘accurate’ representation depends on the paradigm it is judged in – a different frame yields a different standard of accuracy.16 Where a writer’s identity and experience differ from their subject, that gap shapes how readers receive the text. To close this gap, many cultural institutions seek the perspectives and experiences of the people and communities they represent – through models like the Wing Luke Community-Based Exhibition Model (CBEM), which puts people in charge of their own stories. Successful text in this category does not just represent people; it is an authentic account of their experiences (fig.5).17
Readability
Fig.6: Guiding scales for ‘Readability’ focus area, ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric
A text should be easy to read. Because every institution’s audience is different, writers must consider their readers’ literacy levels and write to meet them there – without making readers feel like the text is of reach or not meant for them. Institutions that welcome families may find this hardest to balance, as even one group of visitors can span a variety of reading abilities. Readability differs from accessibility in what it centres: accessibility centres the preliminary requirements for reading – whether a reader can physically see or feel the text, and whether it is in a language they understand – while readability addresses cognitive access, a cross-disciplinary theory rooted in the education field that considers readers’ cognitive abilities. A range of factors can affect cognitive ability, including intellectual or developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, trauma (such as traumatic brain injury), age and access to education. These can effect how people process information – impacting comprehension, literacy and numeracy, reasoning, memory, attention and even language capacity.18 For cultural institutions to be genuinely inclusive of cognitive diversity, their audience-facing texts must reflect it: using vocabulary readers likely already know, defining terms they may not, and avoiding complex sentences or words that make text harder to locate and read (fig.6).
Reference/Reverence
Fig.7: Guiding scales for ‘Reverence/Reference’ focus area, ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric
Showing reverence for and giving reference to the creators and bearers of ideas, works, culture and knowledge is vital to inclusion in cultural institutions. Museums have been criticised for failing to respect and credit the people and cultures at the centre of its stories.19 Honouring creators supports a fuller understanding of a subject, who created it and the context it comes from. Understanding that unmerited authorship is more common in individualistic cultures, writers in cultural institutions have a duty to use their writing to credit the creators and originators of the subject.20 Crediting creators is not just good practice; it distinguishes cultural appreciation from appropriation and shows respect to the people – living and dead – who are connected to the subject. Successful text in this focus area leaves readers with knowledge of who creates or carries a subject, and their impact on it. Where direct involvement from the people represented is not an option, this focus area sets a standard for elevating their contributions in the text (fig.7).
Trauma-informed
Fig.8: Guiding scales for ‘Trauma-Informed’ focus area, ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric
When audiences engage with cultural institutions they bring a range of past experiences with them. As education scholar James Garrett writes, each person carries a psychic history of learning, trauma and experience that such encounters inevitably call forth.21 While it is not the role of cultural institutions to address an individual’s traumas directly, there is a responsibility, out of respect for audiences, to understand and carefully navigate how trauma is represented. Institutions that do this reduce the risk of causing further harm to visitors. The trauma-informed focus area encourages writers to consider readers who may be negatively impacted by a text’s subject. Approving texts about violent events, people or ideas that risk traumatising or re-traumatising readers can be difficult, especially where it conflicts with supporters’ or constituents’ expectations. However, for cultural institutions committed to positive impact and empowerment, these moments are opportunities to act on that commitment rather than avoid it. As historian Dominick LaCapra argues, trauma cannot be understood as purely individual or psychological – it is bound up with social and political conditions and can only be engaged with in relation to them.22 Telling one-sided or partial histories can withhold knowledge readers may need to move toward healing and to recognise present-day echoes of past trauma. At the same time, LaCapra cautions against equating history with trauma, since doing so can obscure the aspects of history that help prevent trauma or lessen its effects’.23 Text that succeeds in this focus area supports a healthy response to difficult content by giving readers the knowledge, skills or opportunities they need to engage with it (fig.8).
Voice/Tone
Fig.9: Guiding scales for ‘Voice/Tone’ focus area, ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric
Writers shape voice and tone through the words they choose, and those choices colour how readers perceive both the institution and the subject. Across an institution, a consistent voice builds a sense of dependability for readers. As the Smithsonian puts it: an organisation’s voice communicates its personality and core values, including the words and framing it consistently uses or avoids.24 Successful text in the ‘Voice/Tone’ focus area conveys respect through both word choice and placement. If voice is the writer’s attitude towards their audience, and tone is the text’s mood, writers must consider not only the subject and the institution’s attitude toward it, but also the reader’s own relationship to that subject.25 Because tone and emphasis in language follow rules that are often unspoken and unevenly understood, writers must consider whether their meaning is clearly communicated to audiences who do not share their own experience.26 This becomes especially important across cultural differences. As Ravelli states, institutions seeking to be inclusive of diverse visitors need to consider which genres, ways of speaking and forms of presentations feel valid, relevant or appropriate to different communities – questions that genre studies alone cannot fully answer, making real, sustained community consultation the only reliable way forward.27 Getting voice or tone wrong carries risk: a poorly chosen word can do as much damage as a well-chosen one can build trust, and writers must be alert to the messages their language sends, intentionally or not.28 Setting and maintaining a high, institution-wide standard for voice and tone helps prevent misunderstandings and signals the institution’s values to audiences (fig.9).
Testing the ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric
The flexibility of the ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric makes it applicable to every audience-facing text, but not every focus area applies to every text. For example, the ‘Alignment’, ‘Accessibility’ and ‘Readability’ focus areas might be applied to an exhibition text in a children’s museum, where audience members vary in terms of ages, reading levels and language skills. Readers of a theatre programme, however, are generally older with a higher reading level, engaging with content with different institutional standards and points of engagement. Writers of these kinds of text could therefore benefit from support in the ‘Clarity’ and ‘Context’ focus areas.
The rubric’s guiding scale is accumulative; texts written to meet the standards of the ‘Best’ category in a particular focus area must also meet the standards listed for the ‘Good’ and ‘Better’ categories. The guiding scale sets high expectations with the purpose of encouraging deeper thinking about a text’s purpose and audience, and about the organisation’s engagement goals.
As part of the rubric development process, I asked museum workers to use the rubric to guide the writing or editing process for audience-facing texts. Most of the participants worked in departments where writing was used primarily to share information with the audience, such as education, curation and training. Testers chose two or three focus areas for each text based on its purpose, audience, and when and where the audience interacts with the text. They used their existing knowledge of their audiences and their needs, the text’s purpose and point of engagement to determine which focus areas to apply. I gathered feedback using a survey, asking questions about use cases, intended audience and impressions on the rubric. The feedback was positive, citing both the ease of use and the level of support provided by the guiding scale. I used their feedback to help shape the final version of the rubric, removing superfluous and ill-defined categories and updating existing ones. In its early stages the rubric had thirteen focus areas, which included ‘Sensory Engagement’ and ‘Congruency Focus’, and combined the ‘Reference/Reverence’ and ‘Voice/Tone’ focus areas. Some feedback was shared in conversations outside the formal feedback questions, which focused primarily on the selected text, usability and rubric scores. The selected texts ranged across departments, including wall texts, volunteer training materials, event programmes, exhibition pamphlets, and the rubric was used to create new texts and edit existing ones. This informal feedback improved the rubric by resulting in clearer instructions and category focus area descriptions.
Conclusion
The ways in which cultural institutions communicate with audiences differs from one department and purpose to the next, which means individual contributors must have a shared understanding and application of the organisation’s communication goals if they are to send out a unified message. The ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric exists to improve the standards for audience-facing text in cultural institutions both immediately and over time, across several dimensions. Its aim is to support writers in cultural institutions in accumulating the skills, processes and knowledge that generate impactful, inclusive writing that drives deeper audience engagement.
The ‘Good, Better, Best’ Rubric can be downloaded as an A4 handout and an A3 poster.