A Few General Writing/Presenting Tips
- Statistics is a “getting the details right” business - we care deeply about details, and this applies to writing code or complete English sentences. R Studio has a spell-checker. To use it, click F7.
- Nothing impresses us as much as a clear and concise argument, presented using well-written English sentences, effective and well-labeled figures and tables.
- Don’t parrot back material that Dr. Love wrote or said. State ideas in your own words. Stating them in other words is, technically, plagiarism.
- Edit your more adventurous output; don’t present everything you know how to do in R, and don’t forget that someone is trying to read both your code and your results.
- Make your work easy to evaluate. In responding to an assignment, be sure to answer the question that was asked, restating it as necessary.
- Clearly label everything: graphs, tables, your answer to a specific question. Everything. Again, make your work easy to evaluate.
- Simplify. Emphasize ideas in plain language. Avoid jargon. Use English well.
- Data are plural. Use “the data are …” rather than ``the data is … ’’
- A paragraph must contain more than one sentence.
- Don’t switch tenses. If you want to write in the present tense, stick to it throughout.
- Don’t write or say random sample unless you used a random number generator. If you used haphazard sampling or convenience sampling, call it what it is, and indicate whether any problems could have cropped up as a result.
- Similarly, don’t defend a method of data collection because it is random. Most of the time we want to represent some population, and a random sample is just one way to ensure that certain types of biases have a low probability of creeping in.
- If you want to write that you used \(\alpha = 0.05\) as your significance level, then state that your results were obtained using a 95% confidence level, not a 95% confidence interval, unless you are actually interpreting a confidence interval.
- If you’re looking at a p-value, then you should state either:
- [1] We’re using a 95% confidence level.
- [2] We’re using a 5% significance level. or
- [3] We’re using \(\alpha = 0.05\).
- Don’t use more than one of these expressions.
15 Refer to all p-values that are less than 0.001 or perhaps less than 0.0001 as \(p < 0.001\), rather than, for instance, \(p = 0.00000001\) or, worse yet, \(p = 0\). In a similar vein, write all \(p\)-values that exceed 0.99 as \(p > 0.99\) instead of, for instance, \(p = 1\).
- To the extent possible, don’t use
computer-ese
to label variables, plots or tables. R and Markdown allow you to change the labels on graphs and tables to meaningful things – do so. Use meaningful abbreviations, as necessary, explaining what they mean on the first usage.
- When in doubt, err on the side of clarity. Clear thinking, clear writing.