Caption meaning7/6/2023 As a general rule, retain broader points in the article body, including specific points in the media file's description field. As with image captions, care should be taken to include enough relevant information in-line so the media file's relevance to the article is made explicit irrespective of the caption. And remember that readers wanting full detail can click through to the image description page.īecause non-visual media imparts no visual information regarding the content of its file, it is often desirable to include a longer description than is typically acceptable with image captions. ![]() More than three lines of text in a caption may be distracting instead, further information can be provided in the article body. Succinct captions have more power than verbose ones. It is not the same as brevity, which is using a relatively small number of words. Succinctness is using no superfluous or needless words. In a biography article no caption is necessary for a portrait of the subject pictured alone but one might be used to give the year, the subject's age, or other circumstances of the portrait along with the name of the subject. Photographs and other graphics need not have captions if they are "self-captioning" images (such as reproductions of album or book covers) or when they are unambiguous depictions of the subject of the article. Sometimes the date of the image is important: there is a difference between "King Arthur" and "King Arthur in a 19th-century watercolor". The present location may be added in parentheses: ( Louvre). If the illustration is a painting, the painter's Wikilinked name, the title, and a date give context. Be as unambiguous as practical in identifying the subject. Make sure your caption does that, without leaving readers to wonder what the subject of the picture might be. One of a caption's primary purposes is to identify the subject of the picture. What would you say while attention is on the image? What do you want your audience to notice in the image, and why? Corollary: if you have nothing to say about it, then the image probably does not belong in the article.Ĭlear identification of the subject However, it is best not to tell the whole story in the caption, but use the caption to make the reader curious about the subject.Īnother way of approaching the job: imagine you're giving a lecture based on the encyclopedia article, and you are using the image to illustrate the lecture. ![]() ![]() Those readers, even if the information is adjacent in the text, will not find it unless it is in the caption. Others read the first paragraph and scan through the article's body for other interesting information, looking especially at pictures and captions. Some people start at the top and read each word until the end. establishes the picture's relevance to the article ĭifferent people read articles in different ways.clearly identifies the subject of the picture, without detailing the obvious.There are several criteria for a good caption.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |