Lists and tables are a useful means, in the right context, of presenting a large amount of information in a clear and user-friendly form. A good many paragraphs, a good deal of complicated syntax, as well as much tedious repetition would usually be involved if you attempted to provide the same amount of data in prose. There are few, essentially stylistic issues involved in the construction of tables; these will be dealt with briefly below. First, let us look at lists.ListsConsider the following fairly lengthy sentence:The lessee of the hall is responsible for ensuring that the building is left in a clean and usable condition, that all electric lights and appliances are turned off, that no personal property belonging to the lessee is left inside the building, that people leaving the building do so in a quiet and orderly manner, that all windows and doors are left locked, and that the keys are returned to the church office on the following day. Though there is nothing intrinsically unclear about these instructions, they might perhaps have more impact if they were presented in the following manner:The lessee of the hall is responsible for ensuring that the building is left in a clean and usable condition;
all electric lights and appliances are turned off;
no personal property belonging to the lessee is left inside the building;
people leave the building in a quiet and orderly manner;
all windows and doors are left locked;
the keys are returned to the church office on the following day. This makes it much easier for the person or group renting the space to see precisely what is expected of them.There is something at least crisp, if not positively imperative, about a list:Every participant will be expected to arrive equipped with the following items: warm clothing
a waterproof coat
sturdy walking shoes
a backpack
emergency rations
a nonalcoholic drink
a map If businesslike crispness is not part of your purpose, then it may perhaps be better to avoid using a vertical list. There is a place for lists in business letters, reports, certain types of essays, and indeed anywhere where it would assist the reader to give prominence to a number of distinct items or factors.The standard forms of punctuation for lists are illustrated in the two examples above. When the items making up the list complete the sentence begun by the introductory words, no end-of-line punctuation and no final period are necessarily required. This format is, however, more suitable for lists in which the individual items consist of single words or only a few words. Where the listed items are longer, it is better to end each one with a semicolon (or a comma), and in that case the list must end with a period.Grammatical Continuity in ListsPunctuation in most lists is, as the previous paragraph pointed out, dependent on the items in the list completing the sentence by the words that precede the colon. It is, therefore, important that each of the listed items matches up grammatically with the introduction:The committee objected to the proposal on the grounds that the schedule was unrealistic;
it had not been properly costed;
no assessment had been made of the strength of the competition;
likely competition also with the company's existing product lines;
the unavailability of a trained management team. For such a list to work properly, each separate item must follow grammatically the introductory words and be able to form a complete sentence. Too often when people are drawing up lists, they lose touch with the opening section and loosely attach a fresh item to the one that went before, as is the case above. The following is not a proper sentence:The committee objected to the proposal on the grounds that likely competition also with the company's existing product lines Nor is this:The committee objected to the proposal on the grounds that the unavailability of a trained management team In both these cases, the above list lost its grammatical coherence because there should have been a verb in the clauses that follow that, as there is in the earlier items. Obviously, the easiest way to maintain coherence is to give all the items in the list the same form. Therefore, if we recast those clauses so that they contain verbs, grammatical coherence will be restored (see below).It is also important that you choose the introductory words with care in order to ensure that they provide a suitable springboard for what follows them. It is often, for example, easier to construct a series of clauses to follow that than it is to find nouns or noun phrases to follow a simple preposition. If, for instance, the writer had chosen to make the introductory words The committee objected to, some of the items shown above could be made to fit easily enough:The committee objected to:
the unrealistic schedule
the lack of proper costing … But it would be difficult to attach the last three items in anything like their present form. For example,The committee objected to the unavailability of a trained management team. seems like a proper sentence but does not actually make good sense because the committee are not objecting to there being no managers but because there are no managers.There is one further question mark over the original example list given above. The second item forms a perfectly good sentence when attached to the introductory words:The committee objected to the proposal on the grounds that it had not been properly costed. It is quite clear here that it refers to the proposal. In the actual list, however, where it had not been properly costed appears as the second item, the reader may not know whether it refers to proposal in the introduction or to schedule in the first item.A list, therefore, needs to be thought of as a whole, as a series of branches emerging from the same stem. The correct relationship must be preserved between branches and stem on the one hand and between the various branches on the other. A revised version of the original example list should look like this:The committee objected to the proposal on the grounds that:
it had not been properly costed;
the schedule was unrealistic;
no assessment had been made of the strength of the competition;
the new product might also compete with the company's existing lines;
there was no trained management team available. TablesTables usually contain data in number form, often in percentages, that is arranged in vertical columns and horizontal rows.Let us assume that you wish to construct a simple statistical table showing computer ownership among a sample of 500 people aged between 20 and 60, organized according to age ranges: 20–30, 31–40, 41–50 and 51–60.This table requires four columns. The left-hand column, known technically as the "stub," lists the various categories of people or things to which the information given in the other columns refers. The second column shows the number of people or things in that particular category, and the other columns show the percentage of people or things that fit a particular description.The topmost row of the table contains the column headings, which give the relevant descriptions. Our example table might, therefore, look like this:| Age | Number | Have computer (%) | Do not have computer (%) |
| | 20–30 | 185 | 82.3 | 17.7 | | 31–40 | 140 | 71.4 | 28.6 | | 41–50 | 170 | 70.5 | 29.5 | | 51–60 | 105 | 61.9 | 38.1 | | Total | 500 |
A similar result can be achieved using the tables tool in a word-processing program:| Age | Number | Have computer (%) | Do not have computer (%) | | 20–30 | 185 | 82.3 | 17.7 | | 31–40 | 140 | 71.4 | 28.6 | | 41–50 | 170 | 70.5 | 29.5 | | 51–60 | 105 | 61.9 | 38.1 | | Total | 500 |
Each table should be numbered and have a brief caption:TABLE 1
COMPUTER OWNERSHIP BY AGE If the table is reproduced from another source, the source should be acknowledged.If the piece you are writing contains many tables, these should be listed, together with their title, at the beginning of the work after the table of contents and the list of illustrations (if there is one). A table should be positioned as close as possible to the correlating passage of text, which may contain an explicit reference to it. You should not leave a table to explain itself. You should relate it to your argument and show how it contributes to the point you are making. With respect to the example table shown above, you might comment in the text:As Table 1 shows, the level of computer ownership is comparatively high among all age groups represented in the sample, but significantly higher among 20- to 30-year-olds than among 51- to 60-year-olds. These results are not unexpected and seem to confirm the principal idea proposed in this study that people who have not grown up with a particular technology may find it hard to adjust to that technology in later years. Tables of much greater complexity than the one shown above can be created, but the same basic principles apply to all.
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