O! say can you synonym

One of the things I do regularly on this blog is share my rewrites of museum labels. This rewrite was sparked by my blog post Sins and Synonymity. I wanted to eliminate a type of synonym use that is particularly confusing to English language learners. While I was at it, I made a lot of other changes. I may have exceed my brief; usually when I edit, I don’t change the tone or the voice quite so much.  But when I looked at the web site of the institution hosting the exhibition (as opposed to the institution that loaned the collection items and presumably wrote the labels), my radical rewrite seemed not entirely inappropriate. And it was good exercise.

This label was the introductory panel for the whole exhibition.

Below is the rewrite. Depending on which online readability rater you trust (if you trust any), I’ve brought the reading level down from somewhere around grade 11 to somewhere around grade 5. But that was incidental to my main aims: avoid synonym sins, and focus on what was special about these flags and this exhibit.

The flags in this exhibit are very large! Why?

These flags were used on ships or at related coastal facilities. People had to be able to recognize these flags from great distances. During the nineteenth century, they made this possible by making the flags very big.

Flags from ships and coastal facilities are called maritime flags. The flags in this exhibit are American maritime flags from the period 1818 to 1893. These flags are all large bunting flags.

A flag is considered “large” if one person can’t comfortably carry the flag when it’s flying from a staff. In the 1800s, the Army thought a foot soldier could carry a silk flag that was as big as 6 feet tall by 6½ feet wide. Most of the flags in this exhibit are much bigger than that!

Because these flags are so large, they are difficult to display. Museums often leave flags like these in long-term storage. Seeing so many of these large flags in one place is an unusual opportunity.

You might notice I left out quite a bit of information from the original label about the sizes of military colors that soldiers were believed to be able to carry. It didn’t seem relevant, since none of the flags in the exhibit were of that type. Plus, the information is hard to understand and makes the label a lot longer. But any good process of rewriting/editing is a negotiation, and if the original writer/curator felt the information was essential, I’d lobby for a sidebar or boxed element, ideally with an illustration to clarify. Even without the sidebar, an illustration could be a big help to this label. That definition of “large” is a bit unwieldy, even when you remove the word “unwieldy.”