Making language accessible: Successful text writing for museum visitors

Abstract

For today's museums and galleries, it is critical that the texts which visitors read are accessible to a diverse audience, and succeed in fulfilling the educational goals of these institutions. Contemporary museums have long since moved on from the state where objects were left to “speak for themselves”: where they were labelled in only a minimal way, and hence left uninterpreted and uncontextualised. Yet an awareness of the significance of language is, on its own, insufficient. Museums need linguistically-informed tools and guidelines, to assist them in their communication tasks. At the Australian Museum in Sydney, Australia, a museum of natural history, a text-production project has been underway since 1993. This project aims to identify the linguistic problems in exhibition texts, to train staff in better writing methods, and to produce linguistically-informed guidelines for text writing in museums. It is primarily informed by the theory of systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994). In this paper, we describe the background to this project, the nature of the linguistic intervention, and the results in terms of visitor comprehension.