Beixi Li

 

1. Initially, we had the quotes from people laid out question and answer style. We literally included the question and then the answer below each picture, and example can be seen below. Looking at this, I just couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that it was repetitive and undermining our simplistic theme.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. To change it, we deleted all the questions and just had the answers. After asking different people, they didn’t understand what the quotes meant anymore. They couldn’t see the whole story or the message that we were trying to share.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. We then thought about writing the questions out at the top of the webpage in subtitle format, but this still didn’t help our audience understand our website. Pretty soon, I realized this was going to take some maneuvering.

 

4. Sitting down and rethinking the entire process, I started fresh. For each quote, I tried to capture the context of how it was said with what the person was doing and where they were, trying to deduce how they felt through their body language.

Initial drafts were a little lengthy, I was still so used to writing in very descriptive metrics. An example would be something along the lines of:

 

        “Black leather jacket, short curly hair, and shoulders hunched in, as he sat in the grass surrounded by his friends, he was the last to speak, and with the softest voice would say, “Acting, I like making people laugh as a career.”

 

Two things wrong with this.

One, it was lengthy, centered on his surroundings and not really what he was answering.

Second, it still didn’t tell a reader what question he was answering.

 

5. As I experimented and changed my writing style, I finally settled on the right mindset when writing these quotes. It’s a combination of situation, question, and answer. Short, concise, and sweet, like:

 

 “A little shy, shrugging in his shoulders, I’m surprised with his answer to “What inspires you?” Looking away he whispers, “Acting, I like making people laugh as a career.”

 

The example I used above finally turned out like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. As I continue to add more pictures and more quotes, I’ve been constantly modifying my approach. I’ve realized that sometimes it has more impact to add in the context while sometimes, the quote says it all. Left alone, it can actually create more of a punch than if I tried to embellish it.

 

As I’ve written more and more of these captions, I’ve been more and more confident in how to approach all the different quotes I’ve been given. I’ve gotten a lot better at changing my sometimes long winded explanations into short photo summaries. The story writer is on her way to becoming a twitterer, or at least, a blogger.