Rick McQueen Assignment 2
I looked over chapters 5 and 1. Chapter 5, which deals with writing books, was mostly not pertinent to me, but I imagine I will want to refer to it in a few years. Having the book planned out beforehand does sound like good advice, especially if the book is an academic treatise.
My favorite takeaway appears towards the very beginning: imagine a specific person whom you know that you consider a potential audience. In school the audience is nearly always a professor, but I imagine that when giving a talk later on one must make a choice about how much they intend to be understood by the entire audience and how much will primarily serve to win the approval of 2-4 specialists in your field who are present.
I find it odd that someone wrote a book about mathematical writing. Perhaps I am reading the wrong things, but most of the math books I have encountered had very similar structures and the same stock of sentences and phrases. Some of the examples in which Krantz iteratively simplifies the communication of an idea ring hollow because all of the examples are phrases that even I, having not started graduate school, have read dozens of times each.
Much of the advice I consider unnecessary, because so much of mathematics is already written in the same voice. Krantz's perspective - stressing simplicity and concision over flowery and pretentious prose - is correct for material intended to teach anything above an undergraduate level, but it's so obviously correct that everyone already does this.
My favorite takeaway appears towards the very beginning: imagine a specific person whom you know that you consider a potential audience. In school the audience is nearly always a professor, but I imagine that when giving a talk later on one must make a choice about how much they intend to be understood by the entire audience and how much will primarily serve to win the approval of 2-4 specialists in your field who are present.
I find it odd that someone wrote a book about mathematical writing. Perhaps I am reading the wrong things, but most of the math books I have encountered had very similar structures and the same stock of sentences and phrases. Some of the examples in which Krantz iteratively simplifies the communication of an idea ring hollow because all of the examples are phrases that even I, having not started graduate school, have read dozens of times each.
Much of the advice I consider unnecessary, because so much of mathematics is already written in the same voice. Krantz's perspective - stressing simplicity and concision over flowery and pretentious prose - is correct for material intended to teach anything above an undergraduate level, but it's so obviously correct that everyone already does this.
Comments
Post a Comment