10 Tips About How to Write a Caption

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If you contribute to production of a print or online publication that includes photographs or illustrations, you’re likely, at some point, to write captions. Here’s some advice about how to write good ones.

1. Caption copy must match the tone of the running text (the general written content, as opposed to display type such as headlines and captions). Determine whether captions should be formal or informal, or serious or humorous, or whether the tone can vary depending on circumstances.

2. Caption format will depend on various factors. Portraits (often referred to as headshots), or images of places or products can simply be captioned with a name: “John Smith,” for example, or “Deluxe Dual-Purpose Widget,” without terminal punctuation. (If the product caption is a description rather than an official product name, capitalize only the first word and proper names.)

Captions for photos or other images showing events or occurrences can consist of incomplete sentences (“Taking the Inchworm personal-transportation device for a test drive”), but it’s generally better to use one or more complete sentences. (“John Smith takes the Inchworm personal-transportation device for a test drive.”) Avoid eliding words, as in “John Smith takes Inchworm personal-transportation device for test drive”; write the caption as if you were speaking it aloud, not as if you were writing a headline or dictating a telegram.

Some publications use a lead-in phrase to establish the caption; these are either straightforward or may be conceptual and might be humorous and/or alliterative as well. They are often formatted in boldface and followed by a colon, and they generally are capitalized like headlines. (“Wiggle Wagon: John Smith takes the Inchworm personal-transportation device for a test drive.”)

3. A brief article can be formatted as a caption; it’s best to distinguish such special features with a box around the photo and caption and/or a different font treatment. (A headline is optional.) The extent of the block of type shouldn’t be less than the space taken up by the photo, and the caption should be broken up into paragraphs if it’s more than a few lines long, and perhaps divided into columns if the image is more than one column wide.

4. Use context to determine how thoroughly to identify photographic subjects. Because a person, place, or thing shown in a photo is almost invariably identified in accompanying running text, titles, affiliations, and other additional information, for example, are rarely required in captions. Subsequent photos of the same subject can be simplified (as when a person’s full name is used only in the first of several captions for photos featuring that person).

5. Avoid replicating content from the running text in a caption. The caption should allude to the running text’s topic, but the specific wording should at most paraphrase the running text.

6. Captions should not use judgmental or facetious language or make assumptions about, for example, a subject’s state of mind. (Of course, a publication that features humorous or satirical content is an exception.)

7. If more than one person is featured in the photo, use directional or other targeting terms (for example, “left,” “standing,” or “holding aardvark”) only if the distinction between the photo’s subjects is not obvious. If you must use such wording, be consistent about style and format. Here are some alternatives (the first of which trusts readers to assume left-to-right orientation):

“Security guards Winken, Blinken, and Nod stand watch.”
“Security guards Winken (left), Blinken, and Nod stand watch.”
“Security guards Winken, left, Blinken, and Nod stand watch.”
“Security guards (from left) Winken, Blinken, and Nod stand watch.”
“Security guards (left to right) Winken, Blinken, and Nod stand watch.”

8. Avoid tired terminology. If, in a photo accompanying an article about a cash donation, a person is pictured pointing at an oversized mockup of a check, don’t write, “Charity Goodheart gestures at a giant check as Greedco chairman Rich Moneybags looks on.” (And ask yourself why your company or organization is publishing such a tired visual cliché in the first place.) Simply write, “Charity Goodheart acknowledges a donation from Greedco chairman Rich Moneybags.”

9. Fact-check all quantitative information such as spelling, names (of people, places, and things) and titles, and data, and double-check that you describe action or procedures accurately.

10. Don’t forget to include credits, and be consistent in style and format. Acknowledge the photographer or stock-photography source with the name alone; there’s no need to write “photo by” or the like. (However, if a photo is provided without charge by another source, credit, for example, “Courtesy Lookatthis.com.”) Distinguish the credit from the caption by using another font or point size and/or placing it vertically along the right-hand edge of the image.

Does Good Writing Matter?

 

The question in the headline for this post is the heading of an online survey I came across recently. I’ve reproduced the survey questions below and answered them based on my own opinions. Complete the survey yourself, and then compare your responses with mine.

1. Do you judge other people based on their writing?
Yes, and although I know that mitigating factors such as dyslexia and poor education exist, resulting in writing that inaccurately reflects a person’s intelligence or expertise, I naturally trust people more to provide valid, accurate information if they can express themselves well in writing.

2. What bothers you most about how others write?
The response choices are “grammar and punctuation (e.g., subject/verb agreement, misplaced commas),” “word use (e.g., they’re, their, there),” “long, difficult sentences,” “vague purpose,” and “poor logic.” This list, in my opinion, refers to errors in reverse order of significance. Faulty logic is the primary obstacle to effective expression, followed closely by vagueness of purpose. Rambling sentences are, by comparison, merely an annoyance, as are incorrect usage, grammar, and punctuation.

3. Have you seen an example of bad writing in the last week?
Yes — rarely a day goes by that I don’t see poor writing. And that’s not because I actively seek it out for the purposes of these posts; leisure or informative reading is often marred by clumsy prose.

4. Where did you see it?
The choices are “email,” “website,” “newspaper/magazine,” and “other.” My response is, all of the preceding. Isolated errors in print and online publications are endemic and almost impossible to avoid (I make mistakes myself, on occasion), but sustained poor writing is also ubiquitous.

5. Do you apply the same writing standards to social media?
Besides yes or no as response choices, the survey allows for making exceptions for Twitter and Facebook. I don’t use either product — or any social media besides email and this blog — but I do apply the same writing standards to any writing. I write informally when doing so is appropriate, but I never use text-speak or any other shortcuts, in social writing as well as in professional writing, though I forgive them in the off-the-clock writing of others.

6. Do you correct the writer when you see a mistake?
When I taught copyediting, students occasionally expressed their unease at sending emails to me because they were concerned that they would make an error. My gleeful responses to such correspondence were generally along the lines of, “Actually, you made four errors,” followed by details about each. I’ve done the same thing to a few unfortunate Daily Writing Tips readers as well, but I don’t send unsolicited corrections to anyone.

7. Why or why not?
During my editing career, I’ve been privy to many such messages. Often, someone will write something like “You made a mistake in such-and-such an article. Doesn’t anyone check your publication? You should hire me as a proofreader.”

I would never hire such a person, unless the message were charmingly tongue-in-cheek, because people who write those types of notes with a straight face, by doing so, demonstrate their lack of understanding about the editorial process: Despite the best efforts toward rigor and accuracy, even the best writers and editors occasionally make mistakes, and even the most careful production procedure can break down. That person’s presence is unlikely to fundamentally alter the vagaries of human endeavor.

8. What is your personal pet peeve?
I think the error that irks me more than any other is Gratuitous Capitalization of Words.

9. People often report “rules” that are not, in fact, rules. Also, rules do gradually change, and some people insist on rules that some authorities have relaxed. Which of the following rules do you still follow?
The choices are “Never begin a sentence with because,” “Never end a sentence with a preposition,” “Never split an infinitive,” and “The word they must always refer to a plural, never a single person or thing.”

The rule about because must distinguish between two usages: in an incomplete sentence (“Because I want to”), which is appropriate only in informal nonfiction and in dialogue, and in a complete sentence (“Because I want to go there, I’m saving money for a ticket”), which is unexceptionable. 

10. Would you like to add a question to a future version of this survey? If so, what is it? Include the answer options.
My question is, “How do you determine what constitutes good writing?”

My response is that I study writing and editing resources and try to adhere to universal standards; I also choose between alternative precepts on the rare occasions when opinions differ, using my judgment — or, more rarely, I break the rules if doing so seems pertinent (or impertinent, as the case may be). I also observe and strive to emulate the habits of good writers.

10 Tips About Basic Writing Competency

Here are ten areas to be sure to attend to if you wish to be taken seriously as a professional writer.

Formatting

1. Do not enter two letter spaces between sentences. Use of two spaces is an obsolete convention based on typewriter technology and will mark you as out of touch. If editors or other potential employers or clients notice that you don’t know this simple fact, they may be skeptical about your writing skills before you’ve had a chance to impress them.

2. Take care that paragraphs are of varying reasonable lengths. Unusually short or long paragraphs are appropriate in moderation, but allowing a series of choppy paragraphs or laboriously long ones to remain in a final draft is unprofessional.

3. If you’re submitting a manuscript or other content for publication, do not format it with various fonts and other style features. Editors want to read good writing, not enjoy aesthetically pleasing (or not) manuscripts; efforts to prettify a file are a distraction.

Style

4. Do not, in résumés or in other text, get carried away with capitalization. You didn’t earn a Master’s Degree; you earned a master’s degree. You didn’t study Biology; you studied biology. You weren’t Project Manager; you were project manager. 

5. Become familiar with the rules for styling numbers, and apply them rationally.

6. Know the principles of punctuation, especially regarding consistency in insertion or omission of the serial comma, avoidance of the comma splice, and use of the semicolon. And if you write in American English and you routinely place a period after the closing quotation mark at the end of a sentence rather than before it, go back to square one and try again.

7. Hyphenation is complicated. In other breaking news, life isn’t fair. Don’t count on editors to cure your hyphenation hiccups for you; become your own expert consultant.

8. Avoid “scare quotes.” A term does not need to be called out by quotation marks around it unless you must clarify that the unusual usage is not intended to be read literally, or when they are employed for “comic” effect. (In this case, the implication is that the comic effect is patently unamusing.)

Usage

9. For all intensive purposes, know your idioms. (That should be “for all intents and purposes,” but you should also just omit such superfluous phrases.) On a related note, avoid clichés like the plague — except when you don’t. They’re useful, but generous use is the sign of a lazy writer.

Spelling

10. Don’t rely on spellchecking programs to do your spelling work for you, and always verify spelling (and wording) of proper nouns.