Writing captions that keep grant claims inside the evidence
A caption is the only sentence many trustees will read. It should name the measure, the group, and the limit — in that order.
A figure without a caption is an ornament. A caption that says the programme ‘transformed lives’ when the table shows attendance is a liability. The middle path is a sentence a principal investigator can defend in a corridor after the meeting.
We draft captions in three clauses. First, the measure in the programme’s own words. Second, who is in the count. Third, what the count cannot say. Example: ‘Share of cohort returning a six-month questionnaire (n = 84 of 120 enrolled at baseline); non-respondents are not assumed to have the same outcome.’
Avoid verbs the monitoring never collected. ‘Improved wellbeing’ is not available from a session register. ‘Attended four or more sessions’ is. If a validated scale was used, name the scale and the time points; do not paraphrase it into marketing English.
When two work packages share a chart, the caption must say whether the bars are stacked people (a person in both packages counted twice) or unique people. Panels notice this because they have been caught by it before.
Keep captions under forty words if the funder page is dense. If the caveat needs more room, a second line under the figure titled ‘Reading note’ is cleaner than a paragraph in eight-point type.