Susan Timberlake

Every Word Counts

During the 2010s, I kept an occasional blog, Every Word Counts, about writing for museums and nonformal education. Most of the posts were either related to events such as museum conferences and temporary exhibits (now out of date), or were quick notes to connect readers to relevant happenings in other fields. But a few of the posts were more detailed and still seemed relevant years later, so I ported them to this new site:

  • Will AI put me out of a job? Experiments with Generative AI

    Ever since I read about a college student using GPT-3 to create a blog that went viral, I have been wondering about the possible effects of AI on my ability to make a living as a writer and editor. OpenAI’s recent release of ChatGPT gave me the chance to go straight to the source with…

  • Neuromyths in Education, Part III: Right-brained vs. Left-brained

    See Neuromyths in Education, Part I: Introduction for an overview and definitions. What’s the myth? What’s the reality? Healthy brains show no evidence of one brain hemisphere being dominant in terms of use or activity. What’s the evidence? In an fMRI study1 of more than 1000 brains, researchers reported, [O]ur data are not consistent with…

  • Neuromyths in Education, Part II: Learning Styles

    See Neuromyths in Education, Part I: Introduction for an overview and definitions. What’s the myth? Myth: Learners will learn better if taught using a method consistent with their learning style, an approach sometimes called “meshing.” There are many different taxonomies of learning styles; one systematic review identified more than 70!1 In the museum field, one…

  • Better Living Through Signage, Part I

    Best-selling author Daniel H. Pink has published five books about “the changing world of work,” the best known of which is probably A Whole New Mind. But he also happens to be, in his own words, obsessed with signs. Pink is so obsessed with signs that the most populated category on his blog is about…

  • Neuromyths in Education, Part I: Introduction

    For nearly a year I’ve been trying to write a blog post about neuromyths in education. But the topic is too vast; it warrants at least a book. And there are books. But it’s hard to find time to read outside your discipline, so here are some key points for museum folk. What is a…

  • A Belated Valentine to a Curator at the MFA

    The day after Valentine’s Day. I had arranged to meet someone at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Our plan was to visit Fired Earth, Woven Bamboo: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics and Bamboo Art and then wander the rest of the museum for a bit. It was during the wandering that I came across the introductory…

  • How much information is too much?

    Some recent museum blog posts (e.g. Mediation or interference?, Tilting at Windmills, Part Two) have discussed the appropriate amount of interpretation or mediation in museum exhibitions. I’ve been wrestling with this question ever since interning at the Smithsonian Institutional Studies Office more than fifteen years ago. At the time, the office had just completed a…

  • The Teachable Moment (Humans Are Apes, Too!)

    On a recent zoo visit, my children and I spent a long time observing and admiring the gibbons. As I coaxed them away (my children, not the gibbons), my daughter said, “I love watching the monkeys.” “I think gibbons are a kind of ape,” I said, looking around hopefully for some signage to clear up…

  • Sins and Synonymity (Writing for English Language Learners, Technique #2)

    When I was in high school, preparing for the AP English test, students and teachers often referred to “twenty-five-cent words.” Twenty-five-cent words were long words that made us sound smart. They were to be used in our AP English exam essays, the more the better. We studied clusters of related words and the nuanced differences…

  • Beware of Phrasal Verbs (Writing for English Language Learners, Technique #1)

    We can make our institutions a little more welcoming to diverse audiences by making our labels as readable as possible for visitors who read English as their second (or third, etc.) language. This post will be the first in a collection that describes some techniques for improving readability for this audience. Technique #1: Minimize use…