andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-727 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: In high school and college I would write long assignments using a series of outlines. I’d start with a single sheet where I’d write down the key phrases, connect them with lines, and then write more and more phrases until the page was filled up. Then I’d write a series of outlines, culminating in a sentence-level outline that was roughly one line per sentence of the paper. Then I’d write. It worked pretty well. Or horribly, depending on how you look at it. I was able to produce 10-page papers etc. on time. But I think it crippled my writing style for years. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to write directly–to explain clearly what I’ve done and why. And I’m still working on the “why” part. There’s a thin line between verbosity and terseness. I went to MIT and my roommate was a computer science major. He wrote me a word processor on his Atari 800, which did the job pretty well. For my senior thesis I broke down and used the computers in campus. I formatted it in tro
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1 In high school and college I would write long assignments using a series of outlines. [sent-1, score-0.517]
2 I’d start with a single sheet where I’d write down the key phrases, connect them with lines, and then write more and more phrases until the page was filled up. [sent-2, score-1.061]
3 Then I’d write a series of outlines, culminating in a sentence-level outline that was roughly one line per sentence of the paper. [sent-3, score-1.113]
4 But I think it crippled my writing style for years. [sent-9, score-0.248]
5 It’s taken me a long time to learn how to write directly–to explain clearly what I’ve done and why. [sent-10, score-0.302]
6 He wrote me a word processor on his Atari 800, which did the job pretty well. [sent-14, score-0.21]
7 In grad school I moved toward the Latex approach of starting with the template and an outline (starting with the Introduction and ending with Discussion and References), then putting in paragraphs here and there until the paper was done. [sent-17, score-1.047]
8 When I blog I tend to start at the beginning and just keep writing until I’m done. [sent-20, score-0.433]
9 I’ve learned that it’s best to write an entry all at once–it’s hard to come back a day or a week later to fill in any gaps. [sent-21, score-0.366]
10 I think this has helped my writing style and my writing efficiency . [sent-22, score-0.419]
11 When I’m blogging I commonly start at one place but then, once I’m halfway through, I realize I want to go somewhere else. [sent-25, score-0.417]
12 In contrast, in a proper article you jump right in and say the key point right away, and everything gets structured from there. [sent-26, score-0.267]
13 I’ve tried to improve my blog-writing by contracting introductory paragraphs into introductory sentences. [sent-27, score-0.43]
14 I’ve been blogging for over six years, and it’s affected my writing. [sent-28, score-0.251]
15 More and more I write articles from beginning to end. [sent-29, score-0.454]
16 Sometimes, though, I have a complicated argument to make and it helps to outline it first. [sent-33, score-0.58]
17 In that case I’ll write the outline and then use it as the basis for an article. [sent-34, score-0.882]
18 I write the outline but then set it aside and write the article from scratch, from the beginning, not worrying about the outline. [sent-36, score-1.319]
19 The purpose of the outline is to get everything down so I don’t forget any key ideas. [sent-37, score-0.787]
20 Having the outline gives me the freedom to write the article without worrying that I might be missing something–I can always check the outline at the end. [sent-38, score-1.597]
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same-blog 1 0.9999997 727 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-23-My new writing strategy
Introduction: In high school and college I would write long assignments using a series of outlines. I’d start with a single sheet where I’d write down the key phrases, connect them with lines, and then write more and more phrases until the page was filled up. Then I’d write a series of outlines, culminating in a sentence-level outline that was roughly one line per sentence of the paper. Then I’d write. It worked pretty well. Or horribly, depending on how you look at it. I was able to produce 10-page papers etc. on time. But I think it crippled my writing style for years. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to write directly–to explain clearly what I’ve done and why. And I’m still working on the “why” part. There’s a thin line between verbosity and terseness. I went to MIT and my roommate was a computer science major. He wrote me a word processor on his Atari 800, which did the job pretty well. For my senior thesis I broke down and used the computers in campus. I formatted it in tro
2 0.16315117 1338 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-23-Advice on writing research articles
Introduction: From a few years ago : Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch , using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the literature review
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Introduction: From a few years ago : General advice Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch, using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the l
4 0.13728227 1658 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-07-Free advice from an academic writing coach!
Introduction: Basbøll writes : I [Basbøll] have got to come up with forty things to say [in the next few months]. . . . What would you like me to write about? I’ll of course be writing quite a bit about what I’m now calling “article design”, i.e., how to map out the roughly forty paragraphs that a journal article is composed of. And I’ll also be talking about how to plan the writing process that is to produce those paragraphs. The basic principle is still to write at least one paragraph a day in 27 minutes. (You can adapt this is various ways to your own taste; some like 18-minute or even 13-minute paragraphs.) But I’d like to talk about questions of style, too, and even a little bit about epistemology. “Knowledge—academic knowledge, that is—is the ability to compose a coherent prose paragraph about something in 27 minutes,” I always say. I’d like to reflect a little more about what this conception of knowledge really means. This means I’ll have to walk back my recent dismissal of epistemol
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Introduction: I studied math and physics at MIT. To be more precise, I started in math as default–ever since I was two years old, I’ve thought of myself as a mathematician, and I always did well in math class, so it seemed like a natural fit. But I was concerned. In high school I’d been in the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad training program, and there I’d met kids who were clearly much much better at math than I was. In retrospect, I don’t think I was as bad as I’d thought at the time: there were 24 kids in the program, and I was probably around #20, if that, but I think a lot of the other kids had more practice working on “math olympiad”-type problems. Maybe I was really something like the tenth-best in the group. Tenth-best or twentieth-best, whatever it was, I reached a crisis of confidence around my sophomore or junior year in college. At MIT, I started right off taking advanced math classes, and somewhere along the way I realized I wasn’t seeing the big picture. I was able to do the homework pr
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Introduction: In high school and college I would write long assignments using a series of outlines. I’d start with a single sheet where I’d write down the key phrases, connect them with lines, and then write more and more phrases until the page was filled up. Then I’d write a series of outlines, culminating in a sentence-level outline that was roughly one line per sentence of the paper. Then I’d write. It worked pretty well. Or horribly, depending on how you look at it. I was able to produce 10-page papers etc. on time. But I think it crippled my writing style for years. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to write directly–to explain clearly what I’ve done and why. And I’m still working on the “why” part. There’s a thin line between verbosity and terseness. I went to MIT and my roommate was a computer science major. He wrote me a word processor on his Atari 800, which did the job pretty well. For my senior thesis I broke down and used the computers in campus. I formatted it in tro
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Introduction: In an article entitled 16 Weeks, Thomas Basbøll ruthlessly lays out the time constraints that limit what a student will be able to write during a semester and recommends that students follow a plan: Try to be realistic. If you need time for “free writing” or “thought writing” (writing to find out what you think) book that into your calendar as well, but the important part of the challenge is to find time to write down what you already know needs to be written. If you don’t yet know what you’re going to say this semester, then your challenge is, in part, to figure that out. But you should still find at least 30 minutes a day to write down something you know you want to say. Keep in mind that we are only talking about sixteen weeks in the very near future. . . . Assuming that you do have something say, then, here’s the challenge: write always and only when (and what) your calendar tells you to. Don’t write when “inspired” to do so (unless this happens to coincide with your writing s
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Introduction: Reading this amusing book review on willpower by Will Self ( link from Jenny Davidson) reminds me that recently [actually, several months ago; recall that most of this blog is published on a delay], I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting anything done. I think that when I write this sort of thing it annoys people, because I’m lucky enough to be in a position to get a lot done—projects ranging from the ethics column to Stan—but I get frustrated when I spend a week trying to work, and then when the week’s over, I realize that all I did was respond to emails, review a bunch of journal submissions and grant proposals, and spend a lot of time staring into space while putting off whatever it was that I really thought I should be doing. I thought and thought, and I decided that my best strategy is what I call positive procrastination . Procrastination is of course typically considered a bad thing (or, as ironic-style writers would write, a Bad Thing). But you can actually use it, ju
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Introduction: Thomas Basbøll writes : A blog called The Thesis Whisperer was recently pointed out to me. I [Basbøll] haven’t looked at it closely, but I’ll be reading it regularly for a while before I recommend it. I’m sure it’s a good place to go to discover that you’re not alone, especially when you’re struggling with your dissertation. One post caught my eye immediately. It suggested that writing a thesis is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. As a metaphorical adjustment to a particular attitude about writing, it’s probably going to help some people. But if we think it through, it’s not really a very good analogy. No one is really a “sprinter”; and writing a dissertation is nothing like running a marathon. . . . Here’s Ben’s explication of the analogy at the Thesis Whisperer, which seems initially plausible. …writing a dissertation is a lot like running a marathon. They are both endurance events, they last a long time and they require a consistent and carefully calculated amount of effor
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Introduction: Hal Pashler writes: Ed Vul and I are working on something that, although less exciting than the struggle against voodoo correlations in fMRI :-) might interest you and your readers. The background is this: we have been struck for a long time by how many people get frustrated and confused trying to figure out whether something they are doing/eating/etc is triggering something bad, whether it be migraine headaches, children’s tantrums, arthritis pains, or whatever. It seems crazy to try to do such computations in one’s head–and the psychological literature suggests people must be pretty bad at this kind of thing–but what’s the alternative? We are trying to develop one alternative approach–starting with migraine as a pilot project. We created a website that migraine sufferers can sign up for. The users select a list of factors that they think might be triggering their headaches (eg drinking red wine, eating stinky cheese, etc.–the website suggests a big list of candidates drawn
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Introduction: I Paid a Bribe by Janaagraha, a Bangalore based not-for-profit, harnesses the collective energy of citizens and asks them to report on the nature, number, pattern, types, location, frequency and values of corruption activities. These reports would be used to argue for improving governance systems and procedures, tightening law enforcement and regulation and thereby reduce the scope for corruption. Here’s a presentation of data from the application: Transparency International could make something like this much more widely available around the world . While awareness is good, follow-up is even better. For example, it’s known that New York’s subway signal inspections were being falsified . Signal inspections are pretty serious stuff, as failures lead to disasters , such as the one in Washington. Nothing much happened after: the person responsible (making $163k a year) was merely reassigned .
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Introduction: See paragraphs 13-15 of this article by Dan Balz.
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