Heritage writing: How to captivate your audience
This is an article for museums and heritage sites, for local councils championing local history, and for initiatives bringing the past to life.
But it’s also for businesses – because harnessing the heritage of your company is a sure-fire way to give your brand gravitas. It demonstrates expertise, trustworthiness, and passion for your industry, and it can add colour and spark to your brand story.
Heritage writing pops up all over the place. Personally, I’m a huge fan of an unexpected information board and am not ashamed to double back to a blue plaque. It can be the interpretation panel in a museum, a heritage trail around town, a visitor guidebook, or even a section of your website that delves into the history of your organisation.
Yet so many people cast a cursory glance at these golden nuggets of information and move on. It’s a crying shame and I want to help. Here’s how to hook ‘em when it comes to heritage writing.
Tell it like a story
Because it is! If you only take one thing away from this article about writing for heritage, it’s that you have to find the stories and breathe life into them.
This spot doesn’t just mark the place where a medieval battle happened. It’s the place hundreds of soldiers woke up on a rainy morning, aching from lack of sleep, jittery with nerves. It’s where they heard horns blasting and hooves stamping and metal clanging. It’s where, 700 years later, a little girl discovered a rusty stirrup and a fragment of chain mail while she picked flowers in the field.
Paint your picture, set the scene, and whatever you do – don’t just reel off facts and figures.
That’s true whether you’re writing about a place, an event, an object, or any other point of interest. A Regency lady’s dress in a historic house is beautiful to look at, but it sits behind a glass case. What would it feel like to touch? How would its owner put it on? What dances or teas or diplomatic displays would it have been worn to?
You need to assume your audience has minimal knowledge of the history you’re telling them – and make it your goal to inspire them. If they want to learn even more after reading your heritage content, then you’ve done your job well.
Focus on the people
Now you’re telling it like a story, you’ve got to have characters.
People are the ace up your sleeve when it comes to heritage writing, because they make your content relatable. Who are the individuals in your research? Can you make them a focus?
They don’t have to be heroes (although it’s very cool if they are!). It could be someone who wrote a diary entry about your local landscape when they visited 100 years ago. Or one of the builders who constructed your medieval church and left their trade mark etched into the stone.
You don’t even have to know details. You can hint at things and suggest possibilities to your readers that are backed up by historical context. You might not have a record of the above builder’s name, but you can tell your audience what sort of wage they might have earned and what tools they would have used.
Choose your characters and help your audience get to know them.
Write for your audience
We’ve all seen them. Heritage information boards that read like they were written in the 18th century. Long, old-fashioned words, niche historical terms, and complicated sentence structures... Someone has picked up a pen and forgotten that, although they might be writing about the past, their audience is from the present.
It’s a general rule of thumb that it’s better to write simply. People usually switch off when they see words like ‘monumental inscriptions’ and ‘dissenting Anabaptists’. You want them to keep reading and learning about this fantastic thing you’ve researched!
So, avoid difficult terms, vary your sentence lengths, and break up information into short paragraphs. Appeal to your audience by using words like ‘we’ and ‘you’ and asking them questions. Remember, you’re writing public information, not a university thesis.
For example, instead of saying:
The lord of the manor regularly dined on peculiarities of the period, including mawmenee, a sweet wine stew, which historians believe to have been prepared during the period in which the lord lived here, after having recovered a recipe for it in the kitchen.
…say:
The lord who lived here had a very different diet to us. Have you heard of mawmenee? It’s a sweet stew, made with wine, nuts, spices and bird meat. We think it may have been one of the lord’s favourites, because historians discovered a recipe for it in the kitchen!
As this example shows, simple writing doesn’t have to mean boring writing. Your content should still be evocative and engaging through those stories you’re telling, and the fact that it’s readable makes it all the more memorable.
(Professional writers are great at cooking up content that’s interesting, while still being digestible and deliciously moreish.)
Turn heads
One last top tip for heritage writing – although it’s the first thing a reader will see: headings.
Colours and images might draw audiences towards your information panel or page but, from a writing point of view, you can also grab people’s attention with an eye-catching heading.
There’s one in particular that I’m going ahead and banning outright though. And it’s this one:
‘Did you know…?’
Let’s all make a promise right now to never use this as an information panel heading again. Why? Because it doesn’t tell your audience anything at all. It doesn’t give even a sense of the fascinating knowledge you’re about to impart. And it offers no good reason to stop and read on.
Not quite as bad, but a definite close second, are what I call ‘summary headings’. Titles like ‘Dressmaking in the 19th century’ or ‘Tudor food and drink’ just won’t inspire your audience, unless they’re already interested in those topics.
Your heading doesn’t have to be sensationalist. It just needs to tempt the reader by piquing their curiosity.
Here are some heritage headings I’d stop for:
“Charge!” You’re standing on a medieval battleground
Meet the Victorian dressmakers who worked on this street
What’s cooking in our Tudor kitchen?
…and so on.
Just like the main body of your text, heritage headings should intrigue and engage audiences from the get-go.
So, remember - you’re not just educating your readers, you’re entertaining them, because if they’re not entertained they won’t read on.
Tell them stories, set the scene and capture their attention from the very beginning.
Writing for heritage is my favourite type of content creation. I’ve worked with museums, charities, libraries and archives to tell stories from history, and I’d love to make meaningful connections between the past and the present for your audiences too.
If you’d like to work with a content writer who can also put two History degrees and a childhood obsession with Time Team to good use, please get in touch and tell me all about your heritage project.
