Thursday, February 18, 2016

Local Revision: Wordiness

In every writing situation there are times when one is too wordy and times when one leaves out some words. This is a time of the first; a time when there are too many words.

A paragraph from my QRG draft;

John C. Ashton agrees with Button et al. but instead says its the null hypothesis testing that is the issue in research.  John Ashton seems an intimidating man with his high forehead and deep set eyes, yet as a professor at the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the University of Otago it should be his intelligence that one finds intimidating. His argument against the Button et al. article surrounds the premise that hypothesis testing has become horribly skewed from what it once was, especially since with the small sample sizes the reproduction of results to come to a conclusion will be skewed as well.

As you can see its a little bit too much description, unnecessarily so. To revise this I need to shorten the descriptions a lot; take out all the unimportant information.

McPhee, Nic. "I tend to scribble a lot" 01/26/2008 via Flickr.
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic 

The revised version:

John Ashton agrees with Button et al. that there is a problem with neuroscience research but instead says it's the null hypothesis testing that is the issue; as a professor at the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the University of Otago, his argument may prove to be intimidating for Button et al. His argument surrounds the premise that hypothesis testing has become skewed from what it should be, especially the reproduction of results being incorrect with small sample sizes.

While not too drastic of a change, an entire line of text collectively gone vastly improves the verbosity level of the QRG.

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