May 14, 2018. R.T. Thomason, Ph.D., Figure Editor

 

I was so excited this week when I received a request for a specific blog topic. I was asked by an author to talk a little about formatting graphs. As we all know, graphs are a huge part of many manuscripts. Thus, it is important to put together something that is clear and easy to understand… you have a lot of important data in there! Let’s start off with the axes. You have the x-axis (horizonal axis) and the y-axis (vertical axis). When labeling these axes, you want to use all lowercase lettering. Sometimes this can be confused for capitalizing because it is a label, but in this case you want to keep everything lowercase (unless you are including a proper noun). Easy peasy!