More Caption-Writing Help, and Some Work on Slide Order

In this morning's survey, it's clear that many of you want some additional pointers on the writing of the captions. I think looking at a prior student's draft of the project can help. This is Summer's photo essay on Chinatown, from an historian's perspective. There's a lot to like about this piece, but I'm hoping you'll notice, based on what we've been working with, how some key aspects of the work need some attention.

As a reader, try to notice whether Summer helps give you any context for what the piece is trying to do. Take the title and first slide, for instance. If you just came across this photo essay online, what kinds of guesses would you make about what its purpose was? And how much would you really want to get into it and read more? Second, see if you can make some sense of the order of the slides—is there a way to take this content and make a logical progression for readers? Finally, do you think some of the material is coming from a source? Do we have a responsibility to tell readers where the information is coming from?

In class, we're going to try to work with these issues, and the following links are to examples we'll discuss together and analyze:

• Summer's Photo Essay, reordered.
• Summer's Opening slides, rewritten.

I think you'll notice a few things, namely that the original photo essay has a random order to the material. Consider as well that the captions are about history—but ultimately none of them help readers understand a history of Chicago's Chinatown! Too, I think you can see with the rewritten slides the value of setting a context for readers somehow. As you work on your own projects, please just try to imagine real readers coming across this thing. What are we going to learn?

Also, as we said in class, please remember that this photo essay is clearly plagiarizing some material from a source. The rewritten first slide shows you (as did the Whole Foods examples) how you can handle any source material you deem necessary to include :)