Who needs captions?

9/30/2013

Posted by Jon
I’ve written here before about one of my proposal bugbears – overly-lengthy captions for proposal graphics, which distract from the flow of the document. I’m on something of an anti-caption campaign altogether at the moment, having reflected at length on the advice in the APMP Foundation exam that a great caption should “invite the reader to draw the correct conclusion from the graphic”.

See, if your graphic is good enough, you shouldn’t need a caption to help the reader to draw the correct conclusion: that conclusion should be evident and obvious from the graphic itself.

I'm not arguing (altogether) that you should dispense with captions entirely: sometimes they can be useful, and sometimes they can be expected by the evaluators. But I would argue strongly that captions are often simply making up for the inadequacies of the graphics that they support. Next time you need a caption to explain what you were trying to illustrate, maybe it’s time to re-draw the graphic itself and making it clearer, and more focused on the customer and on the benefits of your approach?

4 Comments

David Newsome

3/25/2016 02:53:36 pm

Hi Jon – quite an easy way around this – the capation is the summary of the benefit (if you can’t summarise the benefit or the benefit is not clear then it certainly needs re-doing!) – e.g. “The timeline for Project success” – the catch is that is has to be done in five words….if you set these rules it is a lot easier – getting it right though takes time!

Brian Thomas

3/25/2016 02:53:48 pm

Well, having tried to practice Shipley for over 19 years (where understood and allowed); I think that a graphic should reinforce your message and therefore the caption should do just the same. You may have some amazing graphics that tell a stand alone story but I have not seen many – personally I think Action Captions are essential and should outline a feature – benefit (or the other way around if you prefer)!

Mike Parkinson

3/25/2016 02:53:58 pm

Great post Jon. Captions are often crutches. Authors tend to use them to “fix” bad graphics.

I teach that if a concept/key word appears in the caption, it must CLEARLY appear in the graphic. I also teach that if the caption is removed the reader/evaluator should get the right message (i.e., synonymous with the caption). If not, the graphic failed. The graphic needs to be edited or reconcepted to be successful.

I was working with a large company. We developed great graphics with ONE SENTENCE captions that quickly summarized the graphics. After every review the authors added, “and reduces risk” at the end of their captions but never changed the graphic. After a few meetings the authors agreed that captions inconsistent with the associated graphics was confusing to the reader/evaluator. Confused people do not say yes (attributed to Sam Horne).

If using a caption, the graphic and caption must communicate the same message. This reinforces the message through repetition and helps tired readers/evaluators easily digest the content.

Jon

3/25/2016 02:54:12 pm

Great debate. I think for me this comes down to the view that a truly first-class graphic shouldn’t actually need further explanation. That people “haven’t seen many” great graphics is more an argument for sorting out graphics with the real experts – like Mike and his team – than leaning on the crutch of a caption to compensate for the inadequacies of their diagrams and illustrations!

(And yes, I am playing devil’s advocate a little, as I did on the earlier post on the ridiculous length of some captions. As I said in both posts, very short / active captions do sometimes have a place – and we do sometimes use them. But I think there’s an important issue of mindset regarding graphics underlying this).

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.

Articles by Topic

Authors

BJ Lownie and Jon Williams are the co-founders of Strategic Proposals.

SP News

Strategic Proposals News

RSS Feed