Penn Professors on Writing in Statistics
Professor Dylan Small
About the Professor
Professor Small received a BA from Harvard University and a PhD from Stanford. He is a statistics professor at the Wharton School of Business; his primary areas of research include design and analysis of experiments and observational studies for comparing treatments, longitudinal data, measurement error, and applications of statistics to public health, medicine, and economics.
Writing Tips
Professor Small doesn’t have a particular handbook to suggest, but a colleague he respects recommends Joseph Williams’ The Craft of Research.
Impoerant Criteria for Student Writing
The top 3 criteria for Professor Small are: reasoning and evidence, organization, and either demonstrating mastery of others’ ideas or having original ideas, contingent on the nature of the paper - whether it built off pre-existing literature or was a completely new idea or method.
Personal Writing Process
Professor Small usually does the initial writing and drafts independently, and then sends it to the journal to receive feedback and subsequently be published.
Links
Back to Writing in the DisciplineOther professors in statistics: Professor Low
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