Featured post

Textbook: Writing for Statistics and Data Science

If you are looking for my textbook Writing for Statistics and Data Science here it is for free in the Open Educational Resource Commons. Wri...

Monday 12 October 2020

Textbook: Writing for Statistics and Data Science

If you are looking for my textbook

Writing for Statistics and Data Science

here it is for free in the Open Educational Resource Commons.

Writing for Statistics and Data Science is given out under the Creative Commons 3.0 - Attribution license. That means you and anyone else has the right to copy it, change it, even sell your version of it, as long as credit for the original continues to be attributed to me. In short, it's open source, have fun. 

There were a few chapters that I didn't include because they were either too niche or too prone to becoming obsolete. I'll be posting them here on the blog, with links being added in this post as those chapters go up. Details after the break.

 


 If you're looking at this as a distance resource, I've tried to make the notes as self contained as possible, so that someone can just read them, instead of having an abridged version that is filled in with explanations in class. If you are looking as this as a live, post-pandemic resource, this is a course that works well with small group projects at the end of every lecture, especially two-hour lectures where people would otherwise just nod off after 80 minutes. There are in-class exercises for this at the end of some chapters. This book is a collection of the course material that I tried and which, from my limited perspective, produced the best pedagogical outcomes.

This is different from other books on composition in that most of it is focused on how to perform specific tasks that someone just finishing a BSc in Statistics or Data Science might be expected to do. Think of it more of a recipe book than a treatise on cooking principles. There are a few early chapters on grammar, style, tone, and audience considerations. (The 'articles: a vs the' chapter is included solely because missing articles is by far the most common grammar error I find when copyediting research papers.) The rest of the book contains guides on how to create questionnaires, poster presentations, technical reports, data dictionaries, and software documentation.

Also, as with everything else, it is written from and for a Canadian audience. Normally in stats this wouldn't matter so much; here it does. Your mileage may vary.

Here are the chapters that are included in the book: 

  • Digital Writing Tools
  • Articles: the vs a
  • Tone and Style
  • Same Research, Two Audiences
  • Equations and Language
  • Citing and Intellectual Property
  • Reporting Results
  • Paper Types and Structure
  • Industrial Writing
  • Verbal Presentations
  • Posters Survey
  • Writing Manuals and Instructions
  • R Documentation
  • Essay Project
  • Data Dictionaries
  • Intro to Consulting
  • Exercise -Scientific Questions
  • Exercise -Equations and Language
  • Reading Assignment Archive
  • Selected Answers
  • Abridged Statistical Thesaurus
  • Works Cited



The removed chapters, some of which will appear here are:


These aren't in the book because they either relied too heavily on external sources, or because they become out-of-date too quickly, so I'd rather leave them here on the blog where I can remove or update things as needed.

Here is a personal mirror to the book, but for metrics purposes, I'd prefer if you used the OER Commons link if it's available.  http://factotumjack.com/StatWrit/StatWrit2020.pdf


Thanks to my wife Gabriela for putting up with this side project all these weekends, and apologies to the students of those first few offerings of the course; I hope your other classes were better.

-Dr. Jack Davis, PhD, A.Stat

No comments:

Post a Comment