How-to-Write-a-Better-Thesis

Illustrations
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they can read and write. That is not to say that these tools can’t be used better—but
their default settings are certainly not intended for pictures that are to be included
in research publications, and maybe it is a good point to remember that every paper
ever published in a major journal over the last 350 years or so can still be found in a
library somewhere. The vast majority of them are online at a permanent URL; your
bad artwork can survive for a long time.
There are many specific things that I find jarring. This list is far from exhaustive:
• Lack of principles. Does a box represent an individual, or a collection, or an action?
What is the difference between a black arrow and a coloured fat arrow? Do
the colours have any significance? Why so many fonts and font sizes? Why are
they so different from each other, and so much bigger or smaller than the regular
text?
• Congestion. Lines that cross each other unnecessarily; arrows that end in space,
or just inside the thing being pointed at; lines that might be pathways, but might
be part of a boundary. Things under other things.
• Clip art. Are comical sketches (drawn by someone else, and often not very good)
really what you want as the most visible feature in your thesis?
• Badly rendered photographs.
• Graphs with grid lines and unnecessary boundaries, poorly captioned legends,
and too many lines. Missing data, out-of-proportion marks and line widths, poor
use of space, and inappropriate sizing can all make a graph impossible to read, or
worse, impossible to take seriously.
There are many good software tools for presentation, some of them free, in addition
to those that are included in the common word-processing packages. Take the time
to ask around and evaluate the options; you may be surprised at how much difference
there is between them.
Many of the principles noted above for figures are just as applicable to tables.
They should be self-contained, with detailed captions; they should not be amateurish.
Choices need to be made about what grid lines to include or omit, how to align
data in columns, what is important, and so on. Complex tables can present particular
difficulties, when, for example, the data is multi-factorial but needs to be represented
on a two-dimensional piece of paper.
I’ve found that a great way to locate examples of good tables is to leaf through
a first-rate journal. These journals use professional typesetters to arrange tables,
and have deep experience in which table elements are clarifying and which are
unhelpful. This is again a case where the defaults in word-processing software are
poor—indeed, I would say they are outright dreadful. Find good examples from
your discipline, and imitate them.
A final thought on this topic is that many of the problems I see in figures and
tables are, I suspect, due to the fact that authors don’t anticipate how much work
they are going to be. Given that the illustrations will be a conspicuous element in
your thesis, expect them to require real effort to get right.