Editing for Clarity and Accessibility

This page contains everything you need to transform drafts into accessible, engaging exhibit content for public audiences.

Your role at this stage: As a content editor or reviewer, you'll take the initial drafts submitted and revise them to ensure they are clear, engaging, and accessible to general audiences, while preserving the integrity of the author’s research and ideas. The presentation below walks you through the complete revision process, from understanding why accessibility matters to collaborating with authors throughout the revision process.

What you'll find here:

• Content Review & Revision Process presentation – Our comprehensive guide covering how to transform scholarly writing into clear and engaging public-facing content, a step-by-step revision process, three essential editing tools, best practices for working collaboratively with scholars, and the complete three-week review cycle.

• Readability tools – Links to teachany.com Text Rewriter, Hemingway Editor, and Read-Able Score Checker

• Before/after examples – Examples showing academic text transformed into clear, engaging, and accessible content.

• Style guidelines – Sentence structure, vocabulary, and organization standards.

Time commitment: Content review and revision typically takes one week per exhibit. You'll work section by section to ensure the writing is clear, engaging, and accessible to broad audiences, while tracking all revisions for discussion with the author.

Remember: This is about clarity, not simplification. The goal is to make complex historical ideas and primary sources accessible to broad audiences while preserving the integrity of the scholarship.