Ah the heady experience of a virgin clown-sighting. We all remember. Bring on the rainbows, Little Bobby Tables.
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Not using colors in scientific writing is discarding a valuable information channel and therefore inefficient. When you are already limited in the allowed word count, this can speed up conveying information and reduce cognitive strain on readers (and possibly yourself). So it's a win-win.
This should not end in chaos though, where colours are more confusing than helpful.
The times when we had to print out each and every single page on a crappy black/white office printer are luckily becoming more and more a thing of the past. So even this is no longer a good reason to not use colours.
Be sure to be careful and thoughtful in your color palette though because if colors are important to the understanding of information then it should be accessible.
A friend once revived an email riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors from her boss that critiqued her (appropriate) use of exclamation points. Specifically, that appearing cheerful was not professional.
Some people just like to be miserable.
The most competent white collar workers I know use exclamation points to the near exclusion of all other pronunciation. This is wild
Faith, what are you doing? Rainbow Tables are for the CS class!
I feel unable to judge without seeing the actual table.
Imagine this, but in a word doc:
Pastels: could be tasteful
Neon: what happened to your eyes?
Yeah.
I usually colour code tables to draw attention to key areas.
If it was color-coded, it would almost certainly not be referred to as a rainbow.
I do it all the time at work as an engineer. Red/bold for bad numbers, green/bold for good numbers. Maybe orange/bold for mixed bag
Red/green isn't really a good combination due to color blindness. Either go blue/orange or at least add icons like ↑ and ↓ next to it.
or at least add icons like ↑ and ↓ next to it.
C# in Excel can't even properly pull values from a table correctly. No way I'm going to waste 2-3 trying to make it concatenate non-alphanumeric characters into cells.
At work, there isn't anyone I have to send tables to that is colorblind. And if that changes, they can make a request. Until then, I'm sticking with red/green
C# in Excel
What is this abomination you speak of? Are you creating your reports by going C# into Excel? O.o
Yeah. My conditional formatting makes some of my Excel tables look like I'm defragging my harddrive.
Here is a colored chart of all my favorite colors:
Where are my dark colors? I wanna be broody and edgy
Why do you hate UV and infrared?
I'm not a shrimp 🤷♂️
Sounds like something someone who doesn't want tonget eaten would say.
You don’t see them?
Why do you hate brown? Pastel colors?
Clearly fake - no-one puts first supervisor in their email signature!
There's nothing wrong with rainbow tables. Printing them sounds a bit excessive, though.
Well, rainbow tables are really valuable in certain disciplines, just not those rainbow tables
What if they’re rainbow coloured rainbow tables? (The thought that someone would print out rainbow tables for their thesis is slightly amusing)
Well, for when you're 300 pages short and you add an appendix...
The APA table I imagined.
They can't even have a pile of baking soda and some baggies?
THE APA drank beer and kicked ass, they didnt need any illicit drugs to do that. Pure Spite and booze fueld them.
Seeing "Why!" makes my brain angry lol
Why, land sakes! What has your jimmies rustled?
I've only ever been academia adjacent and I'm glad. Some of the most soulless people I've ever met. It's the lab grunts who know how to party. Until they have the life sucked out of them to meet some arbitrary writing spec for a journal
Haven't been able to locate the definitive source, but there are several of these out there with Faith and Professor Kutaywa.
Believe it originates somewhere on LinkedIn, but very rare for a LinkedIn meme to escape the platform.
Sounds like something out of a "Legally Blonde" movie.
I’m beginning to think Faith shouldn’t have chosen higher education.
Because it can't accept her avant garde use of color to facilitate learning? Because Faith is ahead of her time? Because she is a pioneer?
What is her crime? Enjoying a table? A colorful, rainbow table?
This is education manifest!
Did the colors in question lack adequate succulency?
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I understand that colors can color, heh, our perceptions but being a primarily visual animal means that we can digest information much quicker through color.
Without seeing the charts, I can’t say if the Prof is just being a curmudgeon or not.
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You’d hope a professor would understand capitalisation. I know in real life that many don’t though.
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My masters thesis advisor would not let us use the word "that". In his defense, 90%+ of the time, it's useless filler and can be left out
*that can be left out
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