I feel unable to judge without seeing the actual table.
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Here is a colored chart of all my favorite colors:

Why do you hate UV and infrared?
I'm not a shrimp 🤷♂️
The APA table I imagined.

They can't even have a pile of baking soda and some baggies?
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)
Seeing "Why!" makes my brain angry lol
A friend once received 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.
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.
There's nothing wrong with rainbow tables. Printing them sounds a bit excessive, though.
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
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!
I have full faith in her. Faith did nothing wrong!
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.
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.
According to the APA website, it’s more about accessibility and the cost of printing color vs grayscale
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/tables-figures/colors
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
You’d hope a professor would understand capitalisation. I know in real life that many don’t though.
Ah the heady experience of a virgin clown-sighting. We all remember. Bring on the rainbows, Little Bobby Tables.
Context, nao.
the context is all there ... Faith is a graduate student working on their masters thesis, in the thesis paper they included tables that they presumably color-coded (maybe different columns had different colors), and they used multiple colors such that it was "rainbow colored".
Apparently the thesis advisor did not like the presence of color and advises using APA guidelines on how to style & format the tables: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/tables-figures/tables
Interestingly your link doesn't mention use of color or lack there of. It does say elsewhere that you shouldn't do it for decoration, though.
That said, things like this are more dictated by the journal you publish to and a thesis has to imitate that. Solution? Graduate and start a journal that requires beautiful color tables, lol
yeah, I think the email is probably fake and made for internet points / humor
I have heard horror stories about how specific formatting has to be for a thesis or dissertation, though - and often those rules are very specific to a particular university or even department. So it's also possible for rules like that to be local and not from a universal standard like the APA guide.


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