Thesis writing: tell a story not a statistic

Worrying about how to analyze your data can get you so focussed on statistics that by the time you come to write up you results you might forget that writing a good thesis is all about telling a good story. No journalist has ever been persuaded to pay attention to a new discovery because the scientist started shouting about the size of their F statistic or the smallness of their p values. Rather, it is by telling a good story that you will capture the curiosity and imagination of your intended audience.

So when you come to write up your results, remember to start with your ideas and only thereafter turn your attention to your analyses. A good approach is something like the following. First, the basic idea or hypothesis phrased in an informal but interesting way (e.g., I think that A is probably the underlying cause of B because of C). Second, the formal test or measure of the idea (e.g., I don’t have powerful approach to being able to test the idea so I am going to use the weaker measure of correlation to see whether there is at least some sort of association between A and B). Third, the results of the formal measure (e.g., I found a correlation between A and B of 0.94). And finally, the conclusion about the idea based on the results of the formal measure (e.g., the surprisingly high correlation shows that there is a strong linear relationship between A and B but the possibility of a causal link will need further investigation).

That particular formula is neither the only one you could use nor necessarily the best one … but it is far from the worst approach and many many times better than simply reporting in succession, the fact that you calculated the correlation coefficient between A and B, did a regression analysis of C, D and E against F, and so forth. Remember, a weak study that is told in an interesting way will almost always get a better examination result than a stronger study that bores your reader to death.

Contributorss: Mark R. Diamond