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Hehong Lu

Marie Webb

Ling 12 MW 11 am

11 March, 2019

Writing as a Statistician

Have you ever thought about how writing affects your future job? I often thought about this

question since I could not understand why writing is a compulsory course in college. Before I

went to college, I always thought that writing is a skill that everyone has. It is not a skill that

needs to be learned systematically. When I thought about my major, financial math statistics

seems have no connection with writing skills. While people mentioned statisticians, the first idea

is that they need to do lots of calculations and make lots of graphs to estimate probabilities.

Predictions about the future economic trend from statistician are big news that everyone is

concerned about. People tend to care only about results, but don’t care enough about the reports

which let us concentrated results. The reports from statistician are very persuasive, which are

often filled with a lot of data. However, the biggest purpose for statisticians to publish articles is

to let ordinary people understanding their results. Just as the article wrote: “An essential part of a

statistician’s work is concerned with presenting his results to ‘customers’ who are not usually too

conversant with statistics” (PDF file). In fact, for statisticians, writing is an important skill. They

have to master the skills of writing a variety of writing genres.

In my interview with statistics professor, Zhijian Li, he could not explain enough how writing

was important for statisticians. It is a powerful tool that he used to teach us knowledge. He

usually published the summarizes of knowledge before the class. In order to let us to preview

tomorrow’s course efficiently, he will ask us one question after the class. And collect our answer
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as data to improve next summarize. By analyzing and calculating this data he developed skills

for knowing what to summarize, and how to write it. He believes good writing skill can let

reader to have fully understand about the difficulties in course. Li also thinks that for

statisticians, the content of writing is very important. To explain, he stated: “Many students who

study statistics will working for boss after they graduated. Expressing data vividly to investors is

a skill that every statistician expects” (Li). He spoke of the difficulties faced by many recent

graduates of statistics. Because they do not have enough work experience, many graduates of

statistics can only work for others. For those graduates, having summarize skill will really help

them a lot during work.

For Zhijian, the technique of writing paper is very important. He first writing stemmed from

the need for research paper. As a statistician, Li needs to publish a research paper every half a

year. He learned from readers’ feedback that most of readers don’t have enough understanding

about statistics as he thought. Many readers do not understand his paper. Because of this, he has

an idea that let the public understanding the paper he published is the driving force behind him.

He started to focus on using the simplest word to explain the most complicated phenomenon.

The desire to popularize statistics in writing came from his life situations and circumstances. He

strived to find the answers to the many “why’s” that came up throughout his life. No matter what

type of paper he wrote, it is always done with a sense of preciseness, understandability, and

critical inquiry.

Teaching philosophy is important for statistician who teach students. Professor Li explained

his writing technique to students, that his teaching philosophy is informative types of writing. As

a statistics professor, he needs to write lots of teaching philosophies before he had hired by

University of California, Santa Barbara. Different from those standard templates of teaching
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philosophies, his teaching philosophy is quite informative. He thinks that every student needs to

be treat differently. He has used informative writing style to wrote his teaching philosophy. This

style impressed his professor and successfully touched the professor. He was hired as it should

have been. After that, he wrote many teaching plans with his emotion that want to help them by

their own way. This way is quite useful, his teaching plan encouraged many students to study

statistics. This kind of special teaching plan has made statistics popular among college students.

For statisticians, writing is very important while they doing programs. Before Li was able to

become a statistical professor, he had to wrote thesis for many statistical programs. After years

of schooling, tedious revisions, writing project reports both inside or outside the university, he

was able to summarize the tips for statistical report. The thesis is a form of writing involving his

own program, while he had a master degree in this field of study. Zhijian’s program included

recording, analyzing and interviewing most his students about the feeling of statistics. In order to

understand what goes into his program, and the significance of it to the students, he wrote a

detailed thesis for this whole program. In this thesis, he talked about the inspiration of this

program. While he was a teaching assistant and help teacher to teach the class, he found that

many college students who chose to study statistics changed to another major finally, and waste

lots of time because they didn't know enough about statistics. Since his friends are went through

same process, he wanted to popularize statistics on most of students. Li would like to help public

to develop some common sense about statistics. People have some prejudice about statistician;

some of them think it is easy major; some of them thinks that statisticians can only calculate.

Through this program, Li wants to eliminate people’s prejudice against statistics and statisticians

For his program to be useful, he had to interview almost all of his students who were in statistical

classes.
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For students in statistics major, interview others are excellent experience for them to prepare

for working. Take Li’s program as an example, he interviewed students in the end of the

program. He had to transcribe interviews to text. Transcription is the process of change ideas,

research, and data in writing. His project brought light to the fact that there is actually an

awareness for these students who study statistics. Interview is a very important process of

program writing. The tip of Li is to add your true feeling in your program reports. This method

seems to be outdated, but your real emotion will make readers have resonate.

Last but not least, for teacher who teach statistics, making assignments is also important. Once

Li finally became an instructor, he knew that he wanted to help everyone to understand statistics.

He declared that “As a professor, I hope that through my efforts, everyone will have a good

understanding of statistics and inspire everyone's love of statistics”. Both his lecture and his

academic papers reflects his goals. One assignment that Li assigned to his students in his pstat

120A class was to pick one statistician that you like the most. The goal of this assignment was to

have students make a personal connection with statistics. For example, one of Li’s students

remember the initial interest that she got touched with statistics. Lots of similar examples prove

that Zhijian’s assignments in statistics courses helped students to fully understand the statistic

major.

In conclusion, I realized how important of writing in statistics field. It was not just about

recording the result of computations or writing articles to publish probabilities, but rather lots of

different writing genres helped statisticians to complete their research or publish their thinking.

Work Cited
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School of Mathematics, The University of Manchester. “Statistical Report Writing.”

Zhijian, Li. Personal interview. 21 February. 2019.