Choosing the Best Formats for Presenting Your Academic Research
If you are in the process of preparing your research for publication via a scholarly journal or press, you very likely already have a good idea of whether you will be writing a short research paper or a long scholarly monograph. However, you may not have decided on all the formats you will use to communicate to your anticipated readers the various kinds of information that must be shared to report your research accurately and thoroughly. There are certainly many options available – running text, lists, tables, images, charts, graphs, maps, notes, appendices and archives are common examples – but the trick is to choose the best formats for presenting your research as effectively as possible.

Running text is the basis of academic and scientific writing, so a great deal of the information you share with readers will need to be presented in formal scholarly prose. Remember that formal scholarly prose is always clear and correct, and that anything less will fail to communicate the procedures and results of advanced research with the precision and sophistication required for publication. Ensure that your spelling is accurate, your vocabulary choices are appropriate and the structure of your sentences varies but never deviates from correct usage patterns. The argument of your document will depend on how effectively you are able to communicate facts and ideas in prose, so working to perfect your writing style and taking the time to proofread your work carefully are vital.

Other formats can be used amidst that perfect prose, enabling you to communicate certain types of information far more efficiently and shorten your overall discussion in the process. Lists might be used, for instance, to offer a number of closely related pieces of information in a compact and user-friendly format. Tables often serve to present complicated data in a visual form that shows major trends as well as exceptions with clarity, and figures of various kinds can similarly present data or provide images of conditions, contexts and procedures. The key to success when it comes to lists, tables and figures is to ensure that everything will be absolutely clear for readers. Lists should be carefully introduced so their content and purpose is obvious. Tables should sport accurate and informative headings, and all nonstandard abbreviations or potentially obscure terms or symbols used in them should be defined. Figures should be visually appealing and make use of captions and labelling that clarify the information they convey.

Ancillary formats such as notes, appendices and archives can also present complex and lengthy information in extremely effective ways. Data and discussions that are closely related to the research and main argument of a paper or book but may prove too lengthy or distracting can be moved for separate treatment into notes, which are particularly well suited to shorter bits of information, or appendices, which serve as venues for longer or more detailed discussions. Readers who are interested will be able to enjoy the material in a fuller form than would be possible were the discussion squeezed into the main document, and readers who are not interested will not be burdened with extraneous data. In many cases appendices will not be included in word counts, and the online archives for additional information that some journals and other scholarly publishers have devised are not usually counted, so if word limits are proving problematic, these options might be especially attractive.