Survey Monkey is fun. I put together a quick questionnaire using our draft introduction text for Peace. My main goal was to check if people noticed the contractions - all three of them - and ask for their opinions about contractions in exhibition text. I took the opportunity to throw in some questions about the overall tone and readability of the text. It took about five minutes.
A few days and thirty responses later, I feel like I have some pretty good material for making the case that we should feel perfectly comfortable including contractions where it feels natural and appropriate to do so. Most people - 67%- didn't notice the contractions. When I asked for thoughts about contractions in exhibition text, the whopping majority -87% - were generally positive, or neutral. I had been instructed to test contractions specifically with military veterans over the age of 55. Of that group, only two expressed displeasure with the contractions - though one hadn't noticed them in the test text.
I'm also carrying out a quick poll in the Peace Sandbox near my office about contractions. Considering how long it took folks to participate in the draft text exercise, it may not be so quick after all, but the idea is to keep the participation going. We also took down the draft text and all the comments. For each comment, we posted a response, along with the redraft. The idea is to validate the great playing we saw with this first exercise.
The next step is to test the redrafted version, as well as an alternative, more conventional version with Museum visitors. I won't use Survey Monkey this time mostly because I would like to simulate exhibition conditions. We'll also test two versions of content text. I hope that the tests show that our preferred conversational version(contractions and all!) is better received. No matter what they show, I know we'll have some meaningful feedback!
I will be referencing this excellent discussion about contractions in my report:
Contractions and How Not to Abuse ‘Em, posted on January 4, 2006 by Roy Jacobsen, on Writing, Clear and Simple
http://writingclearandsimple.com/2006/01/04/contractions-and-how-not-to-abuse-em/
and, Jennifer Blunden's article about conversational tone in museum texts:
Dumbing down for museum audiences — necessity or myth?, in The Fine Print, an ezine by emend editing.
http://www.emendediting.com/html/ezine/issue3/PDFs/BLUNDEN.pdf
