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586 Publishing without perishingme, alter the course of one’s career. Be judicious to the extent that you can,but, unless you have very good reason, never write off anything. And neversay never. If you’d told me back in 1987 that I would have published a bestsellingbook a mere eight years later, I would have asked you what you hadbeen smoking!48.3 Write it, and write it againI’d always liked writing — in fact, when I was in high school, I toyed with theidea of being an English major. But my love of math trumped that idea, andI went on to major first in mechanical engineering at the University of Virginia,and then, realizing I was pretty bored, switched to applied mathematics. Itwas in the last semester of my senior year that, by chance, I took a statisticscourse from a relatively new Assistant Professor named David Harrington.I was hooked, and Dave was such a spectacular instructor that I ended uphanging around for an additional year and getting a Master’s degree. BecauseI was in an Applied Mathematics Department in an Engineering School backin 1980, and because there was no Statistics Department at UVa back then,I ended up taking several courses from Dave (one of the only statisticianson the entire campus), including a few as reading courses. You may knowof Dave — he eventually left Virginia for the Dana Farber Cancer Centerand the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health —and among his many other accomplishments, he wrote a best-selling book onsurvival analysis (Fleming and Harrington, 1991) with his good friend fromgraduate school, Tom Fleming.ImentionDavebecausehewasthefirsttoevertalktomeexplicitlyaboutthe importance of a statistician being a good writer. I had to write a Master’sthesis as part of my degree program, and of course Dave was my advisor. Itwas mainly a large simulation study, which I programmed and carried out (andwhich was fun) — the challenge was to write up the background and rationale,the design of the simulations, and the results and their interpretation in aclear and logical fashion. I will always remember Dave’s advice as I set outto do this for the first time: “Write it, and write it again.” Meaning that onecan always improve on what one has written to make it more accessible andunderstandable to the reader. And that one should always strive to do this.It’s advice I give to junior researchers and my graduate students to this day.I learned a lot from Dave about clear and accessible writing through thatMaster’s thesis. And fortunately for me, my PhD advisor, Ray Carroll, pickedup where Dave left off. He insisted that I develop the skill of writing up resultsas I obtained them in a formal and organized way, so that by the time I hadto begin preparing my dissertation, I had a large stack of self-contained documents,neatly summarizing each challenge, derivation, and result. Ray always