Stats report general comments-Review before Final

DUE: Final Draft AT THE BEGINNING OF SCHOOL for ALL students. Paul and I will be collecting them at 8:40 am.

After grading your second drafts of your statistics reports, I have some general comments that may or may not apply to you for improving your final draft. Please read over the following points completely and highlight the ones that apply to you and improving your paper. I am sorry that I am not there in person to go over this with you. If you have any questions about the points below or comments I wrote on your paper, please send me e-mail I will get back to you as soon as I can.
1) Keep your papers as objective as possible. Look at this as if you are reporting the "news" and keep your personal opinion out of the paper as much as possible. In the summary where you highlight interesting or surprising results (obviously subjective) try to state why these were interesting in a broader context than just your opinion.
2) Avoid 1st person in your writing- it makes it more professional.
3) Don't report the results of your "I wonder" statements without first stating the question that you are looking at. In addition, adding a reason behind WHY you looked into how certain people voted, provides the reader with a better context and makes it more interesting. Although reporting the raw data is dry and just numbers, reporting the "I wonder" statements should be the interesting part of the report. Doing a better job here, will make writing your summary easier as well.
4) Avoid "I wonder" statements that are too narrow. For example, Did McCain voters vote yes on prop. D? This would clearly be an example of why this would be of interest but, more importantly, you need to include both yes votes AND no votes. For each question reported the percentage should add to 100%. Please ask a someone for help if you are still unsure on calculating percentages. There were still some mistakes in your drafts.
5) Include the demographic data in your raw data section. Many of you forgot this. :(
6) Your questions for further research at the end were generally poor. Think of these questions in terms of- if you could have added another question to the ballot that would provide further information worth looking into-what would they be?
7) Please turn your final drafts in the order listed on the rubric. I will mark down if I have to search through your paper for items out of order. In addition, you MUST provide a clean rubric on top of your final draft. Print one out ahead of time from the projects page of my DP.

Last comment- use the help of your critical friend to provide you with feedback. You can compare papers and comments that I made to improve your papers.