"Junior Madison Torres dribbles down the court during the varsity basketball game." That’s a trophy caption — a sentence that describes exactly what the photo already shows and adds nothing. Proofs were coming back full of them, deadline was two days out, and staff needed a fix that would actually hold, not a five-minute reminder that would wear off by the next spread.
See it on Teachers Pay Teachers — $3.20
A fourteen-slide lesson runs one class period, covering all five yearbook caption types with a bad example and a strong rewrite side by side for each. The two-page worksheet is designed to be used the very next day — while the lesson is still fresh, before staff write another real caption — with a Fix the Trophy Caption exercise that hands students three real-style trophy captions and has them add what the photo can’t already show.
Readers look at photos first, captions second, and body copy last if at all — which means the caption is often the only text on a spread anyone actually reads. Two days was enough to fix that, once staff had the right five categories in front of them instead of a vague reminder to "write better captions."
Leave a Reply