Make It Right: Images, Diagrams, and Graphs in Research Papers

Psychologists describe human intelligence as a combination of several different categories of intelligence: intrapersonal, interpersonal, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, linguistic, body-kinesthetic, and musical. Basically, it means that every one of us can be intelligent in many ways.

Howard Gardner mentions these differences in the context of education, pointing out the fact that different people can effectively learn the same materials in different ways, which is a big challenge for the universal approach. People understand and learn things differently, and our way of learning determines the way we read academic papers, as well. Most often, research papers combine text and visual information. Thus, those people who mostly use linguistic intelligence, tend to focus on the written material, while visual-spatial learners focus on images, graphs, and diagrams. The question is, how should you combine visual and written information to write an engaging paper? Don’t worry, these tips at Writers-House website will help you.

The Right Combination

First, you should understand that any academic paper is a written work, no matter whether it has visual elements or not. Therefore, you shouldn’t try to fill your work with unnecessary diagrams, graphs, or other images. Make sure that all your materials are relevant. Since you’re writing an academic paper, you should be able to determine what material is more or less important, making it informative. Obviously, you should also choose the information that can be presented visually, when thinking about images.

It’s easy to determine whether or not you should use graphs. All you have to do is choose the information that will be easier to understand if you illustrate it visually. In addition, you should make sure that this information is important enough to distract your readers from the text so they focus on it. This information should be also quantitatively or qualitatively measurable.

Images can also help you summarize your material. Sometimes, you can sum up a lot of information with just one graph. Images also help to compare different subjects and to indicate specific differences between them.

Don’t add too much information to your images because they will be hard to understand. Don’t forget that your main goal is to combine text and images, so make sure that your images support the text instead of replacing it. If you combine these two types of information properly, your paper will be not only easy to understand but also engaging.

Think Visually

The most important thing is to understand the possibilities of each tool. For instance, graphs are a perfect choice if you need to illustrate statistical correlations or mathematical relationships. If you need to illustrate evolution, you can use a line graph, while a circular graph, as well as a column graph, can show proportions when comparing different parts of the subject.

Academic papers, and research papers, in particular, require you to use graphs properly, choosing data that actually represents a certain difference. Of course, it may be difficult to achieve perfect results, however, if you have enough practice, it won’t be a problem.

Don’t forget that the main purpose of academic papers is communication. Thus, if your graph clearly illustrates your thesis statement, don’t hesitate to use it.