Dear Editor, Compliments on your very informative feature on “Catholicism in England and Wales” (IC 02/06/2016). You won’t mind, I’m sure, if I suggest ways in which an article like this so heavily dependent on statistics could be made more reader-friendly in the future.
The verbal and the visual are not brought together in any explicit way. The findings of the commentary follow one another fairly relentlessly without any reference being made to the diagrams whose role is to support and explain these findings. It is left to the reader to verify in the visuals the truth of the generalisations. The writer, at least some of the time, could have helped the struggling reader by explicitly linking the verbal and the visual in some such way as this: “Three quarters of cradle Catholics don’t go to religious services even once a month (Pie Chart 1, 59.6% + 13.5%).”
Maybe, in saying this, I am simply showing my own poor skills at handling figures. I gave up when I could not make this out: “48.5% of those surveyed said they had no religion”. Consulting the related “Religious Affiliation” chart, I found that this figure (in the blue segment) was assigned, in fact, to a completely different category (and its polar opposite), i.e. the number of Catholics in England and Wales. What a puzzle! When I took up the article again later for another try, I saw where the problem lay. Two segments in the chart were wrongly described: the blue 48.5% (‘Catholic’) and the purple 8.3% (‘No Religion’) needed to change places!
If and when a similar exercise is carried out for this country (and how fascinating that would be!), I hope that this positive feedback will ensure that the reader easily and fully understands the figures you will then present and the story you will tell.
Yours etc.,
Donal McMahon,
Saggart, Dublin 24.