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Spotlight on the Natural Sciences: Use of Visual Images
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En provenance du cours de Duke University
English Composition I
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À partir de la leçon
Writing in the Humanities, Social Science, and Natural Sciences
Additional videos that highlight differences in academic writing across disciplines.
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Dr. Denise ComerAssistant Professor of the Practice; Director of First-Year Writing
Thompson Writing Program
Hi. Today I want to talk to you about using
visual images in the natural sciences. Interestingly, even though our work
involves a lot of observation, visual observation, as well as other types of
observation, the way that we use visual images in our writing definitely falls
under two categories: tables and figures. And then we'll talk about each of those today.
So, we use visuals as part of our writing for a few reasons,
and they all are about making the writing more clear and compelling.
So, we can use tables and figures to emphasize key points,
to draw the reader's attention to key points.
We can also communicate fairly messy data very concisely.
So an example of this would be if we have a lot of statistical analysis to report,
instead of writing that all out in the text, we can use a table to capture that
analysis, and it's also a way of simplifying complex data, and we'll see an
example of that in a minute. So let's start with a table.
So, in academic writing and other kinds of scientific writing, we use tables in
very simple, direct ways. We don't use fancy graphic design on our
tables for the most part. And you can see in this example, this is
a table from my own work where I am listing all of the invasive exotic
species that were important in my study. If I took the time and text to list out
all of these species, both their scientific name and their common name
and then in this case their dispersal mode, it would take a long time
and take a lot of space and it actually would bog down the reader.
So in this case, the table captures all the information. If the reader's
interested in learning more about the specifics, they can take a look at the table.
Figures are often thought of as graphs,
and we do use a lot of graphs and charts in our writing.
And this is an example again, from my own work, of a figure.
And hopefully, what I'm doing is drawing the reader's attention to the most
important finding in my study, and this is a regression line, so the regression
results are the most important thing. Here's the key with doing good figures:
Not only do they need to be designed well,
so that the point comes across, but they also need to have very nicely
written captions. The captions explain the figure and also
direct the reader's attention to the one thing that you want them
to get out of the figure. So in this case, you probably can't see
the small text under the figure, but I start the sentence out with,
“Exotic species richness is partially correlated to,” blah, blah, blah.
So what I'm doing here is identifying the key result of the statistical analysis
and the key thing that I want my reader to pay attention to.
Another thing about figures, and tables too, is that they, in a way,
can stand alone. If I were flipping through a paper or
some kind of document that a scientist is reporting their data within,
I could very easily look at the figures and find the major findings.
This is also important because sometimes we are tempted to describe in the text
exactly what's in the figure. And one of the things that I really want
to emphasize here is that we don't need to do both.
The figures can do some work, and what we need to do in the text is direct our
reader's attention, when appropriate, to the figure to get more information or
a more sophisticated look at something that we're covering in the text.
So overlap is very important to avoid when using both tables and figures.
Fortunately, not all figures need to be graphs; lots of scientific papers are
overwhelmed with graphs. Hey, if we've done a lot of statistical
analysis, we want to show our results, right?
So yes, graphs, bar charts, bar graphs, line graphs, all sorts of things
are used as figures. And these are used when we're talking
about numeric and statistical data. But there may be other kinds of reports
that we want to give. So we may want to document, in my case,
a site that I'm working on. I might want to use photographs of the
forest to show my readers, what this kind of ecosystem looks like,
that I'm interested in. So, there may also be photographs of the
methods that we use. If we're using a particular type of equipment, there may
be a photograph of that equipment. There may also be explanatory figures in our work,
and these would be drawings, or diagrams, or in some cases models, again
of equipment or of relationships between variables.
So I would consider all of these to fall under the “figures” category.
I want to point your attention to a book by the authors Matthews and Matthews
called, “Successful Scientific Writing.” This book is full of a lot of really good advice,
but I think they cover visual images and science writing very well.
And some of this work that I'm
presenting here was inspired by their book.
So, a couple of keys to remember when using images in writing in the natural sciences:
Again, we don't want to repeat the information
in the text and in the tables and figures.
Tables and figures can stand alone, and in fact, many times when we submit
our work to be published, we submit our tables and figures separately.
The captions are what help to highlight the important findings or the important
“Aha!” moments for your reader. Good graphic design is always essential,
and for the most part, when we do publish our work, we use the simplest
graphic design possible. So even though we have lots of tools and
techniques with our word processing to make fancy figures,
we want to be very, very clear and very simple in our design.
Finally, visual images do help tell the story and actually can be
really important to a writer as a starting place.
So, if you've done some work and have found three results that you're
really interested in reporting, in publishing and writing about,
you may actually want to start with your figures. By creating
figures that tell the story clearly, you can then, perhaps, have an easier time
telling that story in the text. Here are a few resources that I think are
particularly useful when thinking about creating this kind of visual image
in our work: The scientific poster link that I have here
is from my alma mater NC State University.
In fact, from one of my advisors, George Hess.
I haven't talked yet about scientific posters, but they are another way that we
communicate our work. It's another style of writing, and it's
not just about taking a paper and blowing it up and making it big
so you can hang it on the wall. There's a whole art to creating a
scientific poster. These are posters that we share with our colleagues at
professional meetings. So if you're interested in knowing more
about what one looks like, what it's used for, and how to design one well,
definitely visit this website. Edward Tufte is sort of the god of
graphic design in the sciences and elsewhere; his website is worth a look.
He has lots of interesting books and resources there.
Infographics is becoming a hot topic in science writing, and you can see some
beautiful examples of these at the information in this beautiful link.
And finally for more detailed instructions on how to create good tables
and figures, the OWL website at Purdue has some great ideas.
Thanks, I hope this was helpful, have a good day.
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