Should I describe all the information?
No. You should only choose the most important information. If you try to include all the numbers it will be boring, and hard to read.
OK – so what information is important?
This is not an easy question to answer. Usually you should look for the following six features:
- The biggest / smallest thing
- Something similar / different (comparisons)
- Something the same
- Something surprising / unsurprising
- Something interesting
- An exception
Example sentences
It is obvious that English was the most commonly spoken language by Internet users.
Unsurprisingly, the number of Chinese was also large.
The number of French and Portuguese users was exactly the same at 73 million each.
The number of Arabic, Russian and Korean users was similar, with 41, 38 and 37 million users respectively.
Korean was the least common language spoken by users.
It is interesting to note that six out of the top ten languages were European, while three were Asian.
There is too much information! I really don’t know what to choose!
If there are a lot of things being compared in the graph, or the information is complex, then you will need to group the information. Here are some ideas:
Types of things being compared | Possible groupings |
sports / leisure activities | dangerous / safe indoor / outdoor social / solitary |
countries / languages / people | Western / Eastern rich / poor developed / developing small / large |
energy | fossil fuels / renewable fuels polluting / clean |
transport | public / private |
Look at this example from the Economist magazine.
Divide the countries into developed and developing. You will a see general pattern:
Generally speaking, developed countries have larger proportion of endangered, highly endangered and extinct languages.
Look at the size of the countries:
With the exception of Papua New Guinea, all the countries are fairly large.
Tip Summary:
- Look for the six features
- Group information. (Also good for writing introductions!)
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