The Science of Scientific Writing

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.877,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx

by MaxGabriel • 12 years ago

68 3 12 years ago

vacri2• 12 years ago

Scanning through the first section, they've got the right idea, but the wrong rationale. The reason why the table is easier to read than the sentence is the spatial semantic grouping of variables. You scan the first column, see the monotonically increasing time, then can directly interpret the numbers in the second column. In the sentence, you have to filter out a lot of chaff before you can understand (or confirm) the basic pattern in the independent variable. They also mixed up the order of the items in the sentence, making for more 'chaff' obscuring analysis It's not about 'familiarity', but the ease of pulling related information - if the sentence was ordered but the table unordered, then depending on the data, the sentence could be easier to interpret, for example.

The second table is unconventional - it is ordered by the independent variable, but it leads with the dependent variable. If we had the convention of putting the independent variable on the right, this table would be perfectly familiar and readable. The rationale isn't "the important information is the temperature", as the article says, but that the table is ordered by the independent variable - we need to know what it is and how it behaves, then we can more easily the relation of the independent variable against it.

vacri2• 12 years ago

Too late to edit: last mention of 'independent variable' should be 'dependent'.

SimpleXYZ• 12 years ago

I have a client with a website that targets scientists. She insists scientists prefer her complex navigational "whatever you call her crazy thing" to a standard, clean, and simple navigation. I keep coming back with "but scientists are people" and it falls on deaf ears. It's so frustrating...

The Science of Scientific Writing

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