a poster session in a crowded conference venue. On these occa-
sions people focus a lot of attention on your presentation slides
or other exhibits. Usually these slides will either be versions of
your existing attention points or designed on similar principles.
Yet the prevailing academic standards for handling attention
points (especially numeric data and tables) are normally poor,
and can often be appalling, creating unnecessary aggravation for
readers and audiences. The rock group Radiohead famously
called on the ‘Karma police’ to arrest someone who ‘speaks in
maths’ and hence ‘buzzes like a fridge ... like a de-tuned radio’.^2
And it is a cliché of the conference circuit that business speakers
will always illustrate their talks with well-designed, legible and
visually attractive computer presentation slides. However, uni-
versity speakers will instead routinely put up undesigned, text-
heavy overhead projector slides crowded with impenetrable text
or littered with dozens of complex numbers (like regression
coefficients to three decimal places), printed in a small, almost
invisible font. Sometimes an academic presenting data says dep-
recatingly: ‘I don’t know if everyone at the back can read this,
but what this number shows ...’, pointing to a smudge of micro-
scopic typescript in the midst of column after column and row
after row of visually identical and completely unreadable
smudges. Similarly in the social sciences, academic journals are
often stuffed with tables full of jumbled, overdetailed and
mostly irrelevant data, which their authors have barely
analysed. These pathologically poor communication behaviours
are amusing at one level, of a piece with the academic novels
that mercilessly dissect contemporary university life. But end-
lessly repeated they are just about as destructive for the external
reputation of academia, cementing ever more firmly an image of
a professional group which does not even have the basic cour-
tesy to communicate its ideas intelligently and accessibly.
Since poor presentation is so endemic, developing a more
consistent approach to handling attention points involves con-
vincing people that there are sound intellectual reasons for
making more of an effort. I begin with a little ‘back to basics’
excursus, looking at the first principles of authoring and how
they apply in this area. After that, I examine in turn some key
issues in handling tables, and then figures or charts, and finally
other forms of attention points like diagrams.
158 ◆AUTHORING A PHD