Fractions, percentages, Emma Watson

I’m reading a bunch of academic articles to cram some intelligence into a paper I’m writing about Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and today I came across one that talks in fractions in one half of a sentence then in percentages for the second. Then it goes to a bunch of randomly plucked and sketchily employed statistics. If you compare the population in one southern English county in 1791 with the mortality rate in a different one in 1805 you get …

You get crap, actually. Comparing pre-Napoleonic War numbers with war numbers, in adjacent counties, just lets you write a lot of jargon on a page without proving anything.

But there were charts, too … filled with vague acronyms and useless figures.

And historians complain that English professors who practice New Historicism just do bad history. These historians just did bad statistics, bad narrative.

Which leads, naturally, to the apocalypse (or MOOCs, which are roughly the same thing).