Guest Guidance on Graphs

Greetings again. Perhaps you remember Thomas Annesley, who wrote a guest post this summer. This week he visited Texas A&M University (where I teach) and gave a presentation. Let me tell you the story and share some of his points.

Tom, who is professor of clinical chemistry at the University of Michigan and deputy editor of Clinical Chemistry, hopes to do more teaching of scientific writing. To obtain ideas, he is visiting others who teach this subject.

Therefore, after the American Medical Writers Association Annual Conference, Tom stayed in Texas to visit me and observe some of my classes.

Tom also gave an open presentation here. He spoke mainly about writing article titles, writing abstracts, and preparing graphs. The room was so full that some people sat on the floor.

The advice on graphs was very helpful. Here are some main points:

• Make graphs self-explanatory. People should be able to understand graphs without reading the article text.
• Emphasize the data, not the overall graph. For example, make the data lines thicker than the x and y axes.
• In general, avoid bar graphs and pie charts. Such graphics tend to be more suitable for the mass media than for journal articles.
• Do not include a graph that wastes space. For example, if values did not change over time, just say so rather than showing it in a graph.

Tom is writing an article containing his advice on graphs. Once it is available, I hope to share it with you.