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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 […]

When I was in high school, preparing for the 1AP 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 […]

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 […]