Acontrols or overseesB? Try and avoid using double-headed
arrows, which are very confusing for readers, and usually
indicate that you do not know what is going on. If you have
a situation where A gives B orders, and then B passes
information back to A, you should show this by using two
different kinds of one-directional arrows, a command and
control arrow from A to B, and an information flow arrow
from B to A in a different colour or format.These recommendations may seem fairly obvious and basic.
But a large minority of PhD students infringe many of these sug-
gestions in their attention points, as indeed do too many senior
academics in published articles and books. Most professional
readers now are quite sceptical about diagrams and other images
which do not follow proper conventions and guidelines. They
will interpret poorly designed or badly labelled diagrams as signs
either of careless authoring or of intellectual soft-headedness on
your part. The ultimate useless diagram is one with a large num-
ber of boxes, each of which connects using double-headed
arrows to all the other boxes in the figure. If that is what you
have got to, you need to recognize what its subliminal message
is for readers: ‘Everything influences everything else. But don’t
ask me how, because I haven’t got a clue.’
ConclusionsGood attention points can greatly strengthen your text, but
their importance does not stop there. The further you go on in
your academic and professional career, the more likely it will be
that you will need to summarize or dramatize long screeds of
text for an impatient audience. You will begin with seminar
presentations, then go on to conference papers, then perhaps
journal articles, and if you go into university teaching then lec-
tures to wider public audiences. Learning the skills of designing
effective attention points early on will always pay dividends. In
the social sciences especially it is becoming harder and harder
to publish text-only articles in many fields, and here papers
with data components and good charts and tables are generally
much more attractive for editors and reviewers. Some of the
HANDLING ATTENTION POINTS◆ 195