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Spotlight on the Natural Sciences: Use of Visual Images

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Rédaction anglaise I

Université Duke

4.6 (379 notes) | 150K étudiants inscrits

You will gain a foundation for college-level writing valuable for nearly any field. Students will learn how to read carefully, write effective arguments, understand the writing process, engage with others' ideas, cite accurately, and craft powerful prose. Course Learning Objectives • Summarize, analyze, question, and evaluate written and visual texts • Argue and support a position • Recognize audience and disciplinary expectations • Identify and use the stages of the writing process • Identify characteristics of effective prose • Apply proper citation practices • Discuss applying your writing knowledge to other writing occasions

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Compétences que vous apprendrez

Essay Writing, English Language, Academic Writing, Editing

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4.6 (379 notes)

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AA

Dec 15, 2017

I very excited to get this certificate and improved my knowledge writing and skills to get better understand for create a fiction with rules that I learned in Duke University

LB

Jun 21, 2018

Helpful, informative, and engaging! I've always been at the top of my classes in English, but this is helping me sharpen my skills even more and apply them to my life.

À partir de la leçon

Writing in the Humanities, Social Science, and Natural Sciences

Additional videos that highlight differences in academic writing across disciplines.

Spotlight on the Natural Sciences: Academic Writing6:38

Spotlight on the Natural Sciences: Writing Process6:54

Spotlight on the Natural Sciences: CSE Citations8:38

Spotlight on the Natural Sciences: Use of Visual Images7:51

Spotlight on the Natural Sciences: Public Writing6:11

Enseigné par

Dr. Denise Comer
Assistant Professor of the Practice; Director of First-Year Writing

Transcription

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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