- Table legends go above the body of the Table and are left justified; Tables are read from the top down.
- Figure legends go below the graph; graphs and other types of Figures are usually read from the bottom up.
The Anatomy of a Table
Table 4 below shows the typical layout of a table in three sections demarcated by lines. Tables are most easily constructed using your word processor’s table function or a spread sheet such as Excel. Gridlines or boxes, commonly invoked by word processors, are optional for our purposes, but unlikely to be permitted in a journal.
Example 1: Courtesy of Shelley Ball
The Anatomy of a Figure
The sections below show when and how to use the four most common Figure types (bar graph, frequency histogram, XY scatter plot, XY line graph.) The final section gives examples of other, less common, types of Figures.
Parts of a Graph: Below are example figures (typical line and bar graphs) with the various component parts labeled in red. Refer back to these examples if you encounter an unfamiliar term as you read the following sections.
Some general considerations about Figures:
- Big or little? For course-related papers, a good rule of thumb is to size your figures to fill about one-half of a page. Readers should not have to reach for a magnifying glass to make out the details.
- Color or no color? Most often black and white is preferred. The rationale is that if you need to photocopy or fax your paper, any information conveyed by colors will be lost to the reader. However, for a poster presentation or a talk with projected images, color can be helpful in distinguishing different data sets. Every aspect of your Figure should convey information; never use color simply because it is pretty.
- Title or no title? Never use a title for Figures included in a paper; the legend conveys all the necessary information and the title just takes up extra space. However, for posters or projected images, where people may have a harder time reading the small print of a legend, a larger font title is very helpful.
- Offset axes or not? Elect to offset the axes only when data points will be obscured by being printed over the Y axis.
- Error bars or not? Always include error bars (SD or SEM) when plotting means. In some courses you may be asked to plot other measures associated with the mean, such as confidence intervals.
