Section 4.4 Closing Ideas
We spent a lot of time in this section discussing how mathematics is presented. One of the main challenges of this is that there are no formal rules that tell you how much or how little writing is required. How much work you show depends on the audience that will be reading the work.
Let's take another look at the example from the worksheet of the very long presentation:
As was noted in that problem, there is nothing wrong with the algebra in this presentation. And if someone asked you to show all of the work, this is what it would look like. But in practice, we would never do this. Why? Because in the context of solving an equation, it's natural to assume that the reader already understands how to combine like terms. The focus of the problem is on the steps needed to solve the equation, and not the steps required to combine like terms.
A more normal level of presentation for that problem would be something like this:
Notice how each step in the presentation is focused on the actual steps of solving the equation, and all the little steps are not shown. This is because the presentation is being tailored to match the goal of the problem.
Reading the instructions of a problem should give you a sense of what the problem is asking you to do, and from that information you can also make decisions about what steps are important and which ones are less so.