Constructing a Table

After completing this unit, given a paragraph containing data you should be able to:

• Identify the table title.
• Identify labels for rows and columns.
• Identify information given in a designated row and column.
• Construct a table.

Using a table to list information according to category is often much clearer than writing out all the information in paragraph form. Let's look at an example of some data first written up in a paragraph. Try to think what information is being given and what sort of trends one could find from the information.

As you can see, the paragraph above contains a lot of numbers and is not always easy to follow. The information given in the paragraph would be easier to decypher if it was presented in a table. To create a table, you need to determine the following things:

• Title of the table.
• Label of each row and/or column.
• Number of rows and columns necessary.
• Data entry for each cell.

• The title of the table--This should be descriptive of the data contained in the paragraph. It should give some clue as to the data contained in the table, as well as any pertinent information such as year of the data collection:

During the 1995-1996 academic year, a survey of the holdings of university research libraries and rank was done in the United States and Canada...

For the paragraph above, the following title would work.

• Label of each row and/or column--The row/column labels come from the types of information that will be displayed in the table. We will need a label for each piece of information that will go into the table.

  ... It was found that [Institution] Syracuse University, in New York, had 2,692,147 holdings, and was figured to rank eighty-first. Harvard University ranked first with 13,369,855 holdings. ...

  From the paragraph we notice we are going to display information about institution, holdings and rank. These will be the column/row labels we need for our table.
  

• Number of rows and columns--You can determine the number of rows and/or columns by the different types of information presented about the topic. From the step above we know the labels for our table. These will account for one set of rows/columns. Once we have the labels, then all we need to know is the number of instances of data. From this we get the total number of row and columns needed.

  In this table we will let the labels account for our columns. This means we have three columns for the table.

  HOLDINGS AND RANK OF UNIVERSITY RESEARCH LIBRARIES IN
  THE U.S. AND CANADA--1995-1996.

  Institution

  Rank

  Holdings

  Rows will contain the set of data for each individual instance.

  It was found that (1) Syracuse University, in New York, had 2,692,147 holdings, and was figured to rank eighty-first. (2) Harvard University ranked first with 13,369,855 holdings. (3) The University of Connecticut was ranked fiftieth place, and reported 2,626,066 holdings. (4) The Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported 2,448,647 holdings, and was ranked in seventy-third place. (Source: Association of Research Libraries)

  In this case we are given four instances, so we will have four rows. For each instance, we have institution name, rank, and library holdings.

  HOLDINGS AND RANK OF UNIVERSITY RESEARCH LIBRARIES IN
  THE U.S. AND CANADA--1995-1996.

  	Institution	Rank	Holdings
  1
  2
  3
  4

• Data entry for each cell--Once we have this table, we can fill in the information for each instance. If there is any numerical data such as rank, we should use that to order the information numerically. This can be done either low to high or high to low.

  Once this is done, you can drop off the row numbers since they do not add any information to the table; in this case, they were used as a counter. The table below presents the same information as the paragraph above.

  HOLDINGS AND RANK OF UNIVERSITY RESEARCH LIBRARIES IN
  THE U.S. AND CANADA--1995-1996.

  Institution	Rank	Holdings
  Harvard Univ.	1	13,369,855
  U. Connecticut	50	2,626,066
  Mass. Inst. Tech.	73	2,448,647
  Syracuse Univ.	81	2,692,147

  Notice that the order of the universities in the table is different from the order they are listed in the paragraph. When moving from the paragraph to the table, it is best to order the instances by any numerical data. In this case, we ordered them by rank.

  From the information in the table, we can see that the number one ranked university contains a lot more holdings than the other three institutions. However, we also can see that there isn’t any clear relationship between ranking and library holding for the three schools ranked 50th and lower.

What is clear is how much easier it is to make any statements when information is presented in a table rather than in a paragraph.

Now, let's practice constructing a table.

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