Why You Should Care about Captions (and 5 tips for making them more effective)

Be honest now. Did you read this text first or did your eye automatically go to the image? (What's that a picture of anyway?)

  If your eye went straight to the image, congratulations, you are perfectly normal. (At least in this). Most people are drawn first to movement, then to color, and then to image.

Ad agencies and other marketers have long known that people tend to read headlines, then captions, and then body copy. This was brought home to me a few years ago when I was sitting in a project meeting for an annual report. The designer and I were agonizing over word counts for the body text and the account rep looked at us and said, "Keep it as short as possible, nobody reads body copy anyway."

Since I was the copywriter on the project, I decided not to take that personally. Besides, she was right. Most people are going to skim your body copy (the main text of the articles) and if they read anything closely, it will be your captions.

It's a good idea to spend at least as much time polishing your captions as you do the lead stories and features in your newsletters and annual reports (electronic and print) and anything else you write that has images, including your Web page.

But how do you write good captions? Lots of practice and a few rules of thumb. This is the checklist I use, but I'm always on the lookout for better ways to do things, so please send me your tips and tricks. Captions are hard.

1. Good captions start with good images. Choose and caption images that reinforce the content in your publication/Web site. I know. This is obvious, right? But it's still surprising how often image selection is left as the final stage or even the afterthought of a project. Think like a magazine. Image rules. Choose images that tell your story. There are many stock photo sites on the Web  (such as istockphoto or flickr) if you can't afford to hire photographers. Or invest in a good digital camera and, if you have a modicum of photographic talent, shoot your events yourself or find a volunteer to shoot for you.

2. Make sure your captions pass the "duh" test. Alas, writing short is hard and writing a caption without being redundant to the image is even harder. How many times have you read a caption that described the image in words? For example, what if we were to caption the image above: "Two black-handed spider monkeys sit in an exhibit at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo." Yawn. The only thing interesting in that caption is that we've identified two things people might not know from the image -- the species of monkey and the location. The rest of the caption is wasted.

It helps to think about why you are captioning the image and who you are captioning it for. For this exercise, let's pretend we are writing an annual report that will be read by (1) donors who helped fund a new monkey exhibit at the zoo and (2) potential donors whom you hope will one day fund a new hippo exhibit. You might want to write a caption that touches on the benefits and the emotions of the moment: "In the wild, black-handed spider monkeys, native to southern Mexico and Central America, spend most of their lives in trees. At the Brookfield Zoo, Marlowe and Collie, two of our six black-handed spider monkeys, climb among the trees in our newest exhibit. The exhibit, made possible by gifts from generous donors, has quickly become our most popular attraction. And the monkeys seem to love it, too."

3. Use vivid, active verbs and make sure you answer any obvious questions. We need to tell people what kind of monkeys those are, where they are, and what in the world they're climbing on. It would be very helpful to know what kind of trees those are in the image. Are they real trees? Some kind of sculpture? If you don't know the answer to that question, you'll need to call the photographer or, in this case, the zoo. (I didn't take very good notes the day we were there so if I was captioning the image for a project, I'd have to call. Corollary tip -- take good notes.)

4. Use your caption space wisely. Think of each caption as part of a larger story rather than as individual stories that go with individual images. Write so that if someone only reads the captions in your publication, they will still get all the highpoints. A good test for this is to line up your images and captions and then read them without the frame of body copy. (One caveat here -- be careful about including repetitive information in captions and articles. If you list all of the donors who attended the dedication ceremony in the caption, for instance, don't list them again in the article.) Your captions need to stand without your body copy, but your body copy does not have to stand without images and captions.

5. Revise, revise, and then, well, revise one more time. Pull out that old writing cliche: make every word count. That goes double in captions. The trick is balancing brevity with interest and active, vivid language. Think about your audience and make sure you've answered all of the questions the image raises.

*Monkey image disclaimer: All of the information (except the facts about spider monkeys) in the caption exercise above is completely made up. I have no idea if that exhibit was new four years ago when I took that picture. Please note that no monkeys from the Brookfield Zoo were harmed in the making of this post.

For further reading on writing captions:

For a discussion of the difference between captions and cutlines, see this this post from the University of Kansas. It also has great tips for writing captions. But for the rest of this post, I'm going to use cutlines and captions interchangeably. Don't tell any of the magazine editors I write for because they tend to be sticklers about the difference.

Another good post on captions is at Poynter and focuses primarily on writing captions in a journalistic style.

Story about writing captions without seeing the images (This was just fun. If you've worked on newsletters long enough, this has happened to you.)

-- Cara