Hi all,

You may be curious how the experiment in teaching writing in
statistics for a mini worked out.  For the last assignment in the
class I asked the students to participate in an online discussion of
how to teach writing in statistics.  I've attached the results of that
discussion to this email.

In addition to what you can read in their responses (attached), I
talked with each of the students individually and, aside from many
additional individual suggestions and observations, I gathered the
following general points:

1. A few students are writing "because they have to" (or some similar
external motivation) rather than either writing to learn or writing
because they are excited to convey what they have accomplished (or
some similar internal motivation).  I suppose that's inevitable, but
it also strikes me as somewhat unfortunate.  It's too much work to
sustain if you are only externally motivated.

2. Because of where the students were (most were working on or
finishing ADA or related papers, some were writing thesis proposals or
thesis material) the course turned out to be more about revising and
peer review.  Many students said that they would also like to have
learned about the process of going from the raw "results" and
miscellaneous notes that they keep for themselves to a first draft of
a paper; there was also interest in a lengthier discussion of the
organization of papers of various types (we did discuss this to some
extent, but apparently not enough).

3. I probably did not do enough short writing exercises in class
and/or for class discussion.

best,

-BJ