At this point two groups of readers may be wondering about
skipping ahead to the next chapter, but they should perhaps
reconsider. The first are people who are confident that their
thesis will not include any attention points at all, because it has
no data in it. They plan to write their whole dissertation in
straight-text mode, that is, page after page of word after word.
If you are in this category you should certainly skip the second
and third sections below (covering tables and charts). But it
could be worthwhile your looking through the first and last sec-
tions of this chapter, because when you do presentations to
conferences or seminars you will normally have to distil a lot
of text into a small compass. Perhaps you plan to read out the
entire text of your paper, a practice still traditional or even
expected in university seminars amongst philosophers and a
few other groups. But in most of the humanities and all the
social sciences disciplines it will be seen as professionally unac-
ceptable behaviour. And at most academic conferences the time
allowances for speakers are much too short to let you read a
whole paper. So how are you going to achieve a compressed
form of your message? And what visual guidelines will you pro-
vide the audience with to keep them in touch with your
thought?
The second group of readers who may feel that they can
skip ahead are those who routinely work with large amounts of
data and believe that they have nothing more to learn about how
to analyse or present numbers, charts etc. In fact this chapter is
entirely relevant for your needs. It will not tell you anything
new about generating data. Instead the focus is on reducingdata
and communicating it more effectively, rather than throwing
an unprocessed mass of information at readers. The techniques
discussed here are simple and straightforward to implement.
They are not esoteric in any way. But they are very commonly
ignored by data-junkie PhD students and their supervisors.
Principles for presenting data well
The essential principle vital for selecting and presenting all
forms of detailed evidence effectively is the ‘need to know’
criterion. Ask first: ‘What will my readers need to see or need to
HANDLING ATTENTION POINTS◆ 159