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Choice of words is a component of subtext, as you hinted at yourself. Below I have hilighted the key action word, which is also an important choice when setting
by 543ge4q3 4y ago
Choice of words is a component of subtext, as you hinted at yourself. Below I have hilighted the key action word, which is also an important choice when setting subtext.
"One in 5 people now think" is a positive-sounding construction which lends more statstical weight to the result than an impartial examination of the numbers, and people who scan headlines are far from impartial.
Other constructions are "4 in 5 still support...", or "80% still support", or "20% now think", which are all still mathematically neutral, but the subtext is different.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 4y agoIs there a phrasing you think would be neutral that still references that data point? I'm struggling to figure out a neutral phrasing involving this data point. My reading of your response indicates that you see a temporal indicator ("now") or a delta indicator ("still" / "no longer") as both introducing bias. "One in five people think Brexit was the wrong decision" without anything clarifying significantly misrepresents the data. It seems your issue is actually with the data point being in the headline at all. Maybe the headline should be a dry thing like "A Brexit survey happened, read inside for details". I won't entirely disagree. But I think this is less about word choice than you think.
- 543ge4q3 4y agoI think it was the book "How to lie with statistics" that dedicated a page or two to the perceived differences when "x%" is used vs "1 in x", depending on the actual value. I think that using "20% now think that..." would give a more accurate impression to someone scanning the headline.