Last Week’s Action Points
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Draft your paper, then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
Have your writing buddy read it critically.
Activate your verbs.
Write down the purpose of your paper in three
sentences or less.
Why is your paper surprising?
In the rhetorical triangle, writer ↔ subject ↔ reader,
understand what the reader needs.
Give the reader “characters and action.”
Guide the reader by following the “old before new”
contract.
Provide the reader connections between
ideas. Eliminate “speedbumps” on the prose
highway with rhetorical signposts.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new
nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any
nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great
battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final
resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is
altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense,
we cannot dedicate,
we cannot consecrate,
we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above
our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we
say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so
nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us
• that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which
they gave the last full measure of devotion
• that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,
• that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government
of the people,
by the people,
for the people shall
not perish from the earth.*
* Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863
Action Points
• Write out each sentence on a blank sheet of paper
and mark off its basic rhythmic units with a "/".
• Read the passage aloud with emphasis and feeling.
Action Points from Strunk and White
http://www.bartleby.com/141/index.html
• Put statements in positive form
• Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one
paragraph to each topic
• As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic
sentence; end it in conformity with the beginning
• Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form
• Omit needless words
“Use, Misuse and Abuse of Language in Scientific Writing”*
The main purpose of any scientific article is to convey in
the fewest number of words the ideas, procedures and
conclusions of an investigator to the scientific
community. Whether or not this admirable aim is
accomplished depends to a large extent on how skillful
the author is in assembling the words of the English
language.
*
“Use, Misuse and Abuse of Language in Scientific Writing”*
The main purpose of any scientific article is to convey in
the fewest number of words the ideas, procedures and
conclusions of an investigator to the scientific
community. Whether or not this admirable aim is
accomplished depends to a large extent on how skillful
the author is in assembling the words of the English
language.
Flab Factor = (55-35)/55= 36%
This example is taken from “The infectiousness of pompous prose,” by Martin Gregory
Graphs: Tufte
http://www.washington.edu/computing/training/560/zztufte.html#Intro
Tables: Make them self explanatory
Equations: punctuated and professional
This map drawn by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army
in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the
Niemen, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia. The
width of the band indicates the size of the army at each position. In September, the army
reached Moscow with 100,000 men. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the
bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time
scales. The remains of the Grande Armée struggled out of Russia with 10,000 men. Minard’s
graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a
single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its
location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army’s movement, and temperature on
various dates during the retreat from Moscow. It may well be the best statistical graphic ever
drawn.
Challenger space shuttle data
"Above, a scatterplot shows the experience of all 24 launches prior to the Challenger [on January 28, 1986]. Like the table, the graph
reveals the serious risks of a launch at 29°. Over the years, the O-rings had persistent problems at cooler temperatures: indeed,
every launch below 66° resulted in damaged O-rings; on warmer days, only a few flights had erosion. In this graph, the temperature
scale extends down to 29°, visually expressing the stupendous extrapolation beyond all previous experience that must be made in
order to launch at 29°. The coolest flight without any O-ring damage was at 66°, some 37° warmer than predicted for the Challenger,
the forecast of 29° is 5.7 standard deviations distant from the average temperature for previous launches. This launch was
completely outside the engineering database accumulated in 24 previous flights." -- Visual Explanations, page 45.
What do you make of this table?
In Journal of Marketing, January 2004