Westfield State College Writer's Guide
Westfield State College Writer's Guide
"Writing in Mathematics?!?"
Sure, everybody's doing it:
Students at all levels are being asked to write in their mathematics classes. In the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics states, "Communication is essential to learning and knowing mathematics" at all levels. Writing plays a central role in mathematical communication. And it's not just elementary and secondary school students that write in mathematics; college and university students are being asked to write in a broad spectrum of mathematics courses. (E.g. in Mathematical Explorations at Westfield State College which is the focus of the Mathematics for Liberal Arts Information Page.)
Future teachers in Massachusetts are currently required to pass the Massachusetts Teachers Test to become provisionally or permanently certified. The Mathematics subject test contains writing assignments that each require responses that are over 400 words in length.
Mathematicians, professional, amateur and mathematics students in training, must write extensively to clarify and document results as well as to communicate them with the community of mathematicians. The September 1979 issue of Mathematical Reviews (vol. 58, no. 3) contains 5,812 reviews, suggesting that more than 70,000 research papers, books, monographs, and survey articles are published in mathematics and the mathematical sciences in a given year!!
"Why are so many people writing in mathematics?"
Communication. Writing is among the most important ways that mathematics is communicated.
Learning. Writing in mathematics aids not only in communication, but in learning. In a sense, writing in mathematics helps you communicate to yourself what is important, how ideas fit together, and the like. Extensive literature devoted to writing in mathematics, some of which is contained in References and Resources , uniformly suggests that writing in mathematics serves as a critical tool for learning.
Key Issues in Mathematical Writing
Conventions in Mathematical Writing
Writing in Mathematics Vocabulary List
"The triumphant breakthroughs of modern science and mathematics, from relativity theory to the
foundations of molecular genetics, have shared the virtues of
elegance, economy, clarity, and simplicity, no matter how counterintuitive the discoveries may have been.
Why then should mathematics and science be taught in our
schools as laden with, and characterized by, the obscure, the complex, the incomprehesible, and the
difficult? Here again, one solution lies in the active use of the
epistemologically sophisticated linguistic capacities of all learners -- their command of ordinary language."
Leon Botstein, President of Bard College
from "Foreward: The Ordinary Experience of Writing", in
Writing to Learn Mathematics and Science, edited by Paul Connolly and Teresa Vilardi.