Writing About Your Work

Designers over-write their portfolios more reliably than they under-write them. Faced with the blank space beside a project, the instinct is to justify, to explain, to prove how hard you thought - and out comes a dense block of text that your reader will not finish. Remember the six-second scan from the very first lesson: the words are read last, if at all, and only after the images have already won a closer look. So the first rule of writing about your work is humbling and freeing at once - assume most of it will be skimmed, and write so the skimmer still gets the point.

This is not a licence to say nothing. Words do real work a picture cannot: they tell the reader what a thing is, what problem it answered, and - crucially for this module - what you actually did. A plan without a line of text is a puzzle; a plan with one clear caption is an argument. The goal is not less writing for its own sake but writing that earns its space. Every sentence should either tell the reader something the image cannot, or it should go.

Here is the test to apply to every line you write: if I delete this sentence, does the reader lose anything they needed? If the honest answer is no - if the sentence merely restates the image, praises your own work, or fills a hole in the layout - cut it. A reader forgives too little text far sooner than too much. Empty space reads as confidence; a wall of grey type reads as anxiety, as someone who does not trust the work to speak and is talking over it.

There is a second, quieter reason to write well and briefly. Your writing is a work sample too. A studio hiring you, or a tutor admitting you, is reading not only what you say but how you say it - can you think clearly, order an argument, and cut? In practice you will write emails to clients, briefs to consultants, captions on drawings, reports to planners. Muddy portfolio prose is a small honest signal that your professional writing may be muddy too. Clear portfolio prose signals the opposite. So treat these few paragraphs not as an afterthought stapled to the pictures, but as one more thing you are being judged on - because you are.

When you do write, most projects need surprisingly few things said. Strip a good project description to its bones and you find a short, repeatable structure. First, what it is - a plain, one-line identification the reader can grasp before anything else: the type, the place, the scale. Second, the problem or brief - what the project was actually trying to solve, in a sentence, because your idea only makes sense against the problem it answers. Third, your idea, or the key move - the one decision that organises the whole thing, stated once and clearly. Fourth, what you did - your real role, which Module 7.4 treats in full but which belongs in the description too. And fifth, if there is one, the single fact worth remembering - a result, a constraint met, a number, the thing you would want the reader to repeat to a colleague.

That is often the whole job. Notice what is not on the list: the design-school abstract ("this project seeks to interrogate the liminal condition of..."), the blow-by-blow of every revision, the adjectives praising your own work, and anything the image already shows. Those are the reflexes of the archive, not the argument.

Watch the difference on a real example. A weak, over-written version:

This project represents an exploration into the dialectic
between public and private realms, seeking to problematise
conventional notions of the threshold through a rigorous
investigation of spatial sequence and material tectonics.

That is 34 words and tells the reader almost nothing they can hold. Now the same project, said plainly:

Threshold House - a courtyard home for three generations
in Pune. The brief was privacy without isolation, so the
plan wraps around a shaded central court that every room
opens onto. I led the plan and the courtyard section.

The second version is barely longer, and the reader now knows the type, the place, the brief, the idea and your role - everything the first version buried. Aim for that. Say what it is, what it solved, what you did, and stop. If you find yourself writing "explores", "interrogates", "seeks to", or "notions of", you are almost certainly hiding a simple point behind grand words - find the point and say it.

The single biggest thing standing between you and clear writing is jargon - and design education is a jargon factory. Words like liminal, tectonic, palimpsest, dialectic, parametric, phenomenological, poché have real meanings in the right room, but in a portfolio read by a busy stranger they mostly function as fog. They let you sound sophisticated without being clear, and a sharp reader knows the difference. The rule is not "never use a technical word" - it is use a technical word only when it is the most precise, plain choice for that reader, and never to impress.

Ask two questions of any specialist word. First: would I say this out loud to a friend explaining the project over coffee? If you would naturally say "the entrance" but wrote "the threshold condition", use "the entrance". Second: does this word carry a meaning a plain word would lose? Sometimes it does - "cantilever", "load-bearing", "north light", "wet area", "FF&E" are precise and a reader in your field wants them. The test is precision, not simplicity for its own sake; you are not dumbing down, you are refusing to hide.

Here is jargon clearing itself:

Before: The scheme leverages a parti of poched service
        cores to liberate the perimeter for programmatic flux.
After:  Bathrooms and stairs are pushed into a solid central
        spine, leaving the outer rooms open and flexible.

Same idea; the second version is something a client could nod along to. Notice that clarity is not the enemy of intelligence - the "after" version actually shows you understand the move well enough to explain it, which is the harder and more impressive thing. Anyone can hide behind vocabulary; explaining simply is the real skill, and readers know it.

Two practical habits help. Read every caption and description aloud - your ear catches pomposity your eye forgives, and any sentence you stumble over needs rewriting. And when you must use a term of art, define it in the same breath the first time, lightly: "north light - the soft, even daylight from a north-facing roof - washes the studio". You lose nothing and you keep every reader with you. Clear writing is not a lower register than clever writing. It is the higher one.

Because different readers give you different amounts of attention, the smart move is to write in layers rather than one block - so the skimmer and the close reader are both served by the same page. Think of three layers, each able to stand alone.

The top layer is the one-liner: a single sentence, usually near the project title, that says exactly what the thing is. "Riverside Library - a small public library on a flood-prone bank in Kochi." A reader who reads nothing else knows what they are looking at. Never make them hunt for this; it is the most-read sentence you will write about any project.

The middle layer is the short paragraph: three or four sentences carrying the problem, the idea and your role - the structure from the previous section. This is for the reader who has been drawn in by the images and wants the thinking. Keep it to a tight block the eye can take in without deciding to "read later" (which means never).

The bottom layer is the captions: one short line per image, each pointing at what that specific image is showing and why it matters. Captions are the hardest-working words in a portfolio because they are read even by people who skip everything else - the eye goes image, caption, image, caption. A good caption does not label ("Section"); it directs ("Long section - the raised reading floor sits above the monsoon flood line"). Module 7.2 is devoted to captions and titles, so here just note that they are the third layer of your writing, not an afterthought.

Written this way, one project spread serves everyone. The six-second scanner reads the title and one-liner and moves on with the right impression. The interested reader adds the short paragraph. The serious reader, or the interviewer preparing to meet you, reads the captions too and arrives with real questions. You have written once and satisfied three depths of attention - which is exactly what a curated argument, aimed at a busy reader, is supposed to do.

> Write about your work the way you would explain it to a smart friend who is short of time: what it is, what it solved, what you did - clearly, briefly, and without a single word you would not say out loud.