1. Do not show tables and figures unless they are necessary for your argument/line of thoughts. All must be accompanied by some description. There is no room for “gambar untuk hiasan” or “photo without description” in technical and academic writings.
2. Here are some items that should accompany tables and figures:
a. Location statement, mentioning the figure/table numbers, and if necessary clarify where they come from..
E.g. “..Figure 5.3 shows…”, “..The results of the experiment is shown in Table 4.5….”. “.. Examples of such devices are shown in Figure 2.2 which is taken from Albert (2015)…
The figure/table must appear (reasonably) immediately after being mentioned in the location statement.
b. Description of the axes or parameters or lines e.g. “… In Table 4.5, the values in collumn 4 is the derived power in Watts using the efficiency factor taken from Table 4.4..”, “.. the dotted lines show the boundary of Malaysian EEZ..” , “.. the values of Cp in Figure 5.6 are normalised using Equation 3.5”..
c. Pick up the main/interesting observations or findings.
E.g. “.. Figure 4.5 shows that students from urban schools tend to perform better in ….”
“… The results indicate that changing the air/fuel ratio has a negative impact on emissions..”
d. Explain how the findings will be useful for your work. Answer the “So What” questions.
E.g. “….the findings confirm earlier works in this issue as reported by Wilson (1999) and Ahmed (2012)..”.
“…the peak values for Cp will be used in the analysis of overall efficiency in Section 5.3..”
EXAMPLE (USING THE ENCLOSED FIGURE)
[Location statement] Figure 10 presents the comparison of probability distribution function plots of the wave period algorithms described in the previous sections using data from the South China Sea. [Explain the parameters] Note that all algorithms were used to derive zero-crossing period, T_z since buoy measurement provide values for T_z . To modify the values of T_P given by Hwang (2009) method, the relationship T_P=1.4T_z was used (Massey, 2010). [Pick up important finding/observations] The figure shows that the probability distribution of the algorithm developed by Mackay (2012) conforms very well with that of the buoy observations. [So what can you do with the findings] Therefore Mackay’s method will be used in subsequent analysis.
DrOY Postgraduate Guide
