Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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
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
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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