Organization: Using Tables to Organize

Like lists, tables are a good way of organizing complex information for your readers. Information put in a table can be scanned quickly and items compared more efficiently.

While you might be most familiar with tables that include numerical data, you can also use them to break down sentence- and paragraph-formatted text into readable (comparable) chunks.

Take the following information. You work at a local nursery, and you are tasked with preparing a handout on small front yard-suitable trees for the local gardening club. You write the following:

Three Small Trees for Your Front Yard

Even if you have a small space, you can still plant one of these trees.

Japanese Maple

The Japanese Maple (acer palmatum) is a slow-growing deciduous tree that, although it does not bloom, comes in a wide variety of shapes and colors. It grows from 12-15 feet tall, prefers full to partial sun exposure, and grows best in moist, well-drained soil.

Serviceberry

The serviceberry (Amelanchier arborea) is a small, rounded tree that bears white blooms in early spring and purplish berry-like fruit in early summer. It can grow up to 25 feet tall and prefers full to partial sun exposure. It also grows best in well-drained, moist, and fertile soil, although it can do well in clay or sandy soil.

Rose of Sharon

This very small tree (Hibiscus syriacus) can reach up to 12 feet in height and blooms in early summer. Depending upon the variety, blooms can be lilac-purple, blue, blue with a red center, white, or dark and light pink. It does well in full, partial or even indirect sun, but is known to prefer well-drained soil of any type.

Technically, there is nothing wrong with this information as written, but if your reader wants to do a head-to-head comparison between these trees, they will have to move back and forth between paragraphs. If you also provide a table that lays out the written information in a scannable form, your reader will be able to compare the trees against each other quickly and easily:

Three Small Trees for Your Front Yard

Tree	Blooms	Mature Height	Sun Exposure	Soil Preference
Japanese Maple	No	12-15 ft	full to partial	moist, well-drained
Serviceberry	Yes	25 ft	full to partial	well-drained, moist, fertile, clay, sandy
Rose of Sharon	Yes	12 ft	full, partial, indirect	well-drained

Tables do not take the place of text, but they do enhance what you have written. Consider how what you write can be set up visually in a table.

 

Basic Guidelines for Tables

Here are some basic guidelines to help you create your table.

• Every column should have a header that indicates the contents of that column. In the above example, the tree column identifies the three types of trees, while the other column headers identify the characteristics to be identified for easy comparison.
• Rows can also have a identifier. In the above example, each row identifies a different tree.
• More complex tables might require subdivisions of the rows and/or columns.
• Center-align the column headings.
• Left-align text in the rows; right-align numbers.
• If your table is being created in Excel, wrap the text Links to an external site. in each cell.
• You should put a title in the first row of the table or just above (outside) it.
• Refer to the table by name in the text before it is shown.