
The Science of Scientific Writing - MaxGabriel
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.877,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx
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vacri
Scanning through the first section, they've got the right idea, but the wrong
rationale. The reason why the table is easier to read than the sentence is the
spatial semantic grouping of variables. You scan the first column, see the
monotonically increasing time, then can directly interpret the numbers in the
second column. In the sentence, you have to filter out a lot of chaff before
you can understand (or confirm) the basic pattern in the independent variable.
They also mixed up the order of the items in the sentence, making for more
'chaff' obscuring analysis It's not about 'familiarity', but the ease of
pulling related information - if the sentence was ordered but the table
unordered, then depending on the data, the sentence could be easier to
interpret, for example.

The second table is unconventional - it is ordered by the independent
variable, but it leads with the dependent variable. If we had the convention
of putting the independent variable on the right, this table would be
perfectly familiar and readable. The rationale isn't "the important
information is the temperature", as the article says, but that the table is
ordered by the independent variable - we need to know what it is and how it
behaves, then we can more easily the relation of the independent variable
against it.

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vacri
Too late to edit: last mention of 'independent variable' should be
'dependent'.

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SimpleXYZ
I have a client with a website that targets scientists. She insists scientists
prefer her complex navigational "whatever you call her crazy thing" to a
standard, clean, and simple navigation. I keep coming back with "but
scientists are people" and it falls on deaf ears. It's so frustrating...

