192 ◆AUTHORING A PHD
Overall, consistently developing and using stem-and-leaf,
box-and-whisker and data smoothing will take very little extra
time or trouble for someone who already has a mastery of
elementary data-analysis techniques. But you can make very
substantial gains in terms of clarifying your own thinking about
what your numbers show, especially if you also follow the guide-
lines set out above for all your tables and charts. Considering
carefully what readers need to know can greatly influence and
inform the rigour and usefulness of your own thinking. It leads
you away from living with complex-seeming numbers that give
the illusion of professional authenticity, and pushes you instead
towards a genuinely synoptic and insightful analysis of what
your data show. Properly understanding data means reducing
them to essentials, being able to separate the wheat from the
chaff, yet without losing sight of the important details.
Using diagrams and images
Thinking is not just the application of pure
concepts arising from a previous verbalization,
it is also the entertaining of diagrammatic
representation.
Umberto Eco^9Some attention points are not in the least numerical, but simply
visual. They work by using the two-dimensional space of a blank
page to permit more complex orderings and re-presentations
of relationships than can be easily accomplished by text descrip-
tions. Text is essentially linear. It arranges things in one domi-
nant sequence, but a purely literary explanation is liable to get
vaguer and harder for readers to follow as the patterns being
described get more complex or convoluted. Here a good diagram
can provide an invaluable spine for readers’ understanding,
allowing them to form a core mental image of how concepts,
events, causes or institutions interact, which can then be fine-
tuned and elaborated by your textual account. Readers pay spe-
cial attention to diagrams of this kind, and they expect them to
do a useful job of work. If they do not, if they seem redundant
or dispensable elements in your explanation, then readers will be