In English class this year, one of the most important things that I have learned is to write without using unnecessary words, and to effectively portray what I am intending to say. I have learned to cut out things that don’t help articulate the meaning of my writing, and to use vocabulary that is clear. Steven Pinker is an author who wrote an essay titled, “Why Academics Stink at Writing.” In this essay, he discussed how academics are bad at writing because they use unnecessary language and complex vocabulary which muddles the point that they are trying to make. In his essay, he asks, “Why should a profession that trades in words and dedicates itself to the transmission of knowledge so often turn out prose that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand?” He goes on to discuss how the scientists make the writing unpleasant to read and impossible to understand because of the language that they use. I apply this knowledge to my statistics class and specifically, my conclusions that can be made from data. In my statistics class I have to be very careful about my word choice for the exact reason the Pinker describes. Communicating statistic results to the general public is tricky in the sense that you are translating a language that not many people will understand. Similar to scientist and other academics, if I were to use the language that we use in the class in my conclusion, the general public would not understand what the results actually meant. I have to be very careful when changing the terminology not to change the meaning of the conclusion. For example, giving a correlation value would confuse a reader who doesn’t have a background in statistics, but saying that “we are 95% confident…” makes sense to the general public.