Exposition: "A systematic interpretation or explanation (usually written) ..."
Making them up as I go (2)
1. Tell the truth.
2. Entice, or fail.
3. To emphasize, summarize.
4. If it ain't short, it don't work.
5. Be clear.
And so I don't forget:
Don't explain. Just tell a story.
Don't argue. Just say things that make sense.
Expect people to be bored by the writing, and shorten it. Make the wording easy to take.
Remove Loose Ends -- the interesting one-liners that go nowhere.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Make conclusions explicit
Always say in words what you expect the reader to see in a graph. Otherwise, the words are unfinished.
The Rules of Exposition
The name of this blog is s'posed to remind you of the Ferengi Rules of Aquisition. I don't claim to know how to write. I don't claim to be expert at this by any means. I just want to be a better writer.
That's why I'm making the blog public. Your comments, your rules, your thoughts are welcome.
A hobbyist and student of the economy, I'm no economist. I got a B.A. in Math in 1970, and promptly went to work in construction. A few years later New York City nearly went bankrupt. I couldn't understand that. A year or two later the news reported that local farmers were plowing their crop into the soil, as it would cost them less than bringing the crop to market.
That's when I signed up for a semester of economics.
About the first thing I noticed was that hardly any of the graphs in the textbook were based on actual numbers. So I started going through Statistical Abstracts at the library, gathering data, doing calculations (at first with a slide rule, later with a Radio Shack PC-1 Pocket Computer with 1K of memory!) and drawing graphs by hand.
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