exhibits are always properly handled with an appropriate soft-
ware package – either a sophisticated word processor, or a
spreadsheet or a presentations package. And it is now much
quicker to produce a given output of satisfactory appearance.
On the other hand, because examiners and readers are aware of
the reduced effort-level involved, their standards of what
counts as a professionally presented exhibit have also upgraded
over time.
Handling tables
Statistics is the plural of anecdote.
Daniel P. Moynihan^2Tables communicate precise numerical information to readers.
They have traditionally been heavily used in any PhD with an
extensive numerical data component. Designing effective
tables is not rocket science. But it is frequently mishandled for
the most trivial and banal of reasons, through a series of small-
scale inattentions by authors to the needs of readers. Authors
with data-heavy dissertations live and breathe their numbers,
and come to know them closely. So they often tolerate a level
of detail or confusion in their data presentation which readers
cannot and will not bear. Consider Tables 7.1 and 7.2, which
show the same table presented in different formats. I hope that
it is obvious to you that Table 7.2 is a much better presented
table. But why it is so much more readable may not be so clear.
Here are the main differences.
Titles and labelling. Table 7.1 has an overly short heading
which says only what kinds of organizations are being com-
pared, but does not give the country location, the time period,
or what is being measured. The title is in the present tense,
which will go out of date. The first column is not labelled at all,
and the second column label uses pointless abbreviation (to fit
text into a spreadsheet column space) and omits any denomi-
nator for the population. Readers would have to look in the
main text to be sure what the table showed. None of the head-
ings and labels use a distinctive font from the rest of the table.
Some of the row labels are printed on two lines, despite lots of
HANDLING ATTENTION POINTS◆ 165