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.