Joan Acocella characterizes my introductory essay, "Variation and Change in Our Living Language," in the 2011 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, as "prescriptivism — no doubt about it" ("The English Wars," May 14th).
At the entrance to Chapter II (p. 44), Costa is almost in danger of having us skip it because his introductory description of "Variation Under Nature" (as opposed to "…Under Domestication," Chapter I) so clearly summarizes it in about ten lines.
The rest were moms, who sang the introductory song, a variation of "This Is the Way We Wash Our Clothes," in waves of softness and warmth.
Because we supported all the sections of all the instructors of introductory courses, the natural variation in teaching across instructors and sections over multiple years makes it difficult to compare year-to-year exams.
The book opens with an introductory section on anatomical variations from the point of view of different clinical practitioners – oral and maxillofacial surgeons, periodontists, and endodontists.
A close examination of the information reveals a pattern which is consistent with a statistical phenomenon, discovered by the French mathematician de Moivre nearly 300 years ago, described in every introductory statistics textbook: namely that variation in performance indicators is expected to be greater in small Trusts and smaller in large Trusts.
Mr. Lupu framed his recital with Schubert in C-minor: first the Impromptu from Op. 90, with its ominous introductory stroke and solemn parade of variations, and then the Sonata D. 958.
Variation in the grades earned in introductory science courses is one factor that affects students' persistence in science-related majors; a lightly graded introductory course versus a harshly graded one has a different effect (Ost, 2010).
Overall, we found large variation in how instructors implement active learning in introductory biology classrooms.
Introductory biology students struggle to incorporate the molecular genetic origin of variation in their evolutionary reasoning framework.
We further extend these findings with additional evidence that college introductory biology students consistently struggle to integrate the molecular basis of variation in their explanatory frameworks of evolution by natural selection.
