Writing notes

These are things I've noticed over six years of doing this, not rules. Where I've changed my mind, I've left the old note in with a line through the reasoning.

Say one thing

A caption that mentions the weather, the company and how you feel about the year is three captions fighting each other. Pick the one you'd say out loud to a friend and drop the others.

The last word does the work

English lands its weight at the end. "On purpose I took the long way" is limp. "Took the long way on purpose" lands. Same words, different ending.

Punctuation changes the tone more than vocabulary

"Fine." and "Fine" are different people. A full stop on a short line reads as flat, deliberate, sometimes cold. No full stop reads as casual, mid-thought. Neither is correct; they're tools.

Beware the words that have been used up

Journey, chapter, era, soft life, main character. They were all useful once. They now signal that the caption came from a list rather than from you. I used "chapter" myself until about 2023 and it makes me wince to read those back.

Specific beats poetic

"Sunset over the water" is a photo description. "Eight minutes late for the last ferry" is a caption. Detail does the emotional work that adjectives keep failing at.

Read it aloud

If you stumble, the reader stumbles. This is the only one of these I'd call a rule.