5.3- Practice writing results

In this next module, we’re going to do some active practice, editing a paragraph from a results section. This table is from a paper I was editing for a student, about running during pregnancy. I’m showing you some relevant snippets from table two. This paper was concerned with, what percent of runners continue running during pregnancy and breast feeding? And how much and how hard they run? Here is the original draft of the paragraph of the results section that corresponded to that table. I am going to ask you in a minute to pause the video, and edit that paragraph on your own. Keeping in mind, that since this table contains the main results of the study, it’s okay to leave some key numbers in. But you have to pick and choose. So now go ahead and pause the video, and edit the exercise, and then restart the video, and I will walk you through my edits. Okay, hopefully you noticed that the author here is just reading the table for you. Hopefully, you also noticed the repetition and wordiness in the pros. I’m going to go through and edit this line by line. Now I picked out certain statistics to highlight that I thought were the most interesting and most important to this analysis. It’s fine if you chose to highlight different statistics, as long as you sufficiently paired the paragraph down. There are actually many possible ways to edit this. So starting with that first sentence. It says, the majority of runners ran during pregnancy, and then we get all of these numbers. I don’t think we need, the majority of, and then all these numbers. I think we can just say, 70% of runners ran during pregnancy, and then we get all of these details about the numbers and the different trimesters. I don’t think we need all of those. I think we can just pick out the most interesting one, and the most interesting number to me was that, almost a third of these women were still running during their third trimester. So that’s the statistic that I’m going to highlight there. So I changed it to 70% of runners ran during pregnancy, and then I’m just giving the total end in the parenthesis, so that we can avoid repeating the 77 in the second sentence. And then, I cut all of that material down to and almost one-third ran during the third trimester, and I didn’t think we needed the exact percentage there, so I got rid of that. For the second and third sentences, you can see that they’re both about the runners cutting back on their mileage and intensity, so we can combine those two ideas into a single sentence. You’ll also notice some repetition. We have from the 77 women who ran during pregnancy, and then at the end of that sentence we have, those who ran. So there’s some repetition, and we can make this a little bit more concise. So I paired all of this down to on average those who ran during pregnancy greatly curtailed their training that setting up both of those pieces, the mileage and the intensity, and then dash, running just 20.3 plus or minus 9.3 miles per week. These are runners, so that’s actually not a lot for them. And then I put and cutting their intensity to about half of their non-pregnant running effort. We don’t need the 47.9%, plus or minus 21% about half is just fine there. Then in the next sentence, I didn’t think we needed a small number of 3.9%, 3 out 77, we don’t need all of those statistics. So I’m just going to say three reported sustaining a running injury while pregnant. It’s obvious that three is a small number. And then the last two sentences go through all of these different statistics about resuming running during the postpartum period. We don’t need all of those, we don’t need to read through the entire table. I picked out two key statistics that I thought were the most interesting. So I notice that, nearly a quarter of the women resumed running within two weeks of giving birth, which I thought was a lot. And then I thought it would be important to highlight what most women did. And so if you look at the table, most women resumed running within two months, so I’m going to highlight just those two statistics. So I paired all that down to in the postpartum period, nearly a quarter, waited two weeks to resume running. And actually I want to make that waited two or fewer weeks, To resume running, to highlight the fact that I thought that was a small amount. They waited two or fewer weeks to resume running. And most resumed running within two months. So that was my edit. Your edit may be somewhat different but hopefully, it pared that down greatly. And here’s my final edit written out if you want to read it without all the red markings.