Re: Tables and Figures. Why not call them both illustrations?

[Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>]

Brigitte,

I qualified my comments by restricting them to the conventions of 
academic publishing, where figures and tables have numbers. In a lot of 
technical writing--user manuals, for example--illustrations are 
unnumbered and are placed immediately after the paragraph that describes 
them.

Where you place illustrations depends on the context and the style guide 
you are following (or not following). There is no one-size-fits-all rule 
here.

In academic publishing, for example, most editors consider it desirable 
to maintain a conservative approach to design. Academic works are 
intended to convey ideas in a calm environment where the reader can 
evaluate them undistracted by design elements. The reader should be 
concentrating on the writer's words, not on the layout. Conservative 
design usually (not always) implies formal symmetry. One of the rules of 
what book designers mean when they use the term formal symmetry is that 
facing pages need to be the same depth (except at the beginning or end 
of a chapter or article, of course). If you place figures in the text 
stream, so that they can fall anywhere on the page, you will inevitably 
end up with facing pages that are not the same depth--some pages will be 
short. To ensure that pages are the same depth, it is necessary to have 
a rule that figures be placed top-or-bottom.

When your goal is to get the reader to take some action, however, the 
important thing is the action, not quiet reflection. The design can help 
enable this mode by using informal (dynamic) symmetry, typical of most 
software manuals. Having pages that do not all look alike is a good 
thing, so maintaining a strict rule about the depth of facing pages is 
of far less importance than in academic publishing.

HTH,

Dick

Brigitte Johnston wrote: