108 8 Outcomes and Results
Illustrations
A typical results chapter consists of argument and narrative supported by illustra-
tions, that is, graphs, diagrams, pictures, and tables. But why are you using them?
The immediate answer to this question is typically: ‘I include a figure when it ex-
presses the point I wish to make more clearly than does the written word’. On this
principle, illustrations are likely to play a role in many parts of your thesis. I discuss
them here because the results chapter is one place where they are not just helpful,
but essential.
However, the use of illustrations to make a point is, I believe, only part of the
reason they are of value. If you wish to get the best out of your illustrations, you
need to put yourself in the position of the reader. Do they read the written text un-
til they get to the sentence, ‘Fig. 6.2 shows that increasing the population density
decreases the per capita consumption of petrol’, and then dutifully find Fig. 6.2 to
check that this is indeed so? Probably not. My experience is that, long before read-
ers begin to work through your results chapter, they will have opened the thesis and
skimmed through it, ‘reading’ the diagrams and looking at the graphs and tables. It
is this, rather than the careful reading that comes later on, that seeds the examiner’s
understanding of your results.
After other preliminaries, such as looking for the aim of the research and reading
the conclusions, the real reading begins. The written text develops ideas in the way
that the writer intended, and readers will no doubt follow this development. But at
the same time they will be generating their own interpretations and impressions.
They will compare material in one chapter with diagrams or text in another in ways
that the writer had not anticipated. They might refer to and puzzle over Fig. 6.2 long
before they read the text that discusses it. They might return to it again when some-
thing written in Chap. 8 triggers another train of thought. Such exploratory reading
is an essential part of thorough understanding of complex work.
Readers use several complementary channels of communication simultaneously,
some using words and some using visual images. They do not use one at a time,
switching from one to the other; rather, they use all of them at the same time, per-
haps giving one more attention than others at any given moment. Nor is learning
always linear. Think of lectures you have been to where the lecturer has used slides
to complement the spoken word. You are busy looking at one of the slides and
thinking about it, while still listening to what is being said, when suddenly, much to
your annoyance, the slide disappears. The lecturer, already busy with the next point,
didn’t think it was of any more interest to you, although you were busy integrating
it with the rest of what was going on in the lecture.
This leads to some rules about visual material:
- The reader should not have to read the text that refers to the illustration to un-
derstand what the illustration is meant to demonstrate. Although an illustration
should always be ‘called up’ by the written text, it should make sense by itself.
In the caption, you should explain the context and how the illustration should be