Help me rewrite the syntax in this statistics sentence I'm editing a dissertation that has this sentence: "The regression analysis equation demonstrates a F(1,44) = 6.220 and p = 0.016 was significant on Problem 2 with the following question." I'm not well versed in statistics, but the syntax of the part in bold doesn't make sense to me. It appears this should be "demonstrates that." And it seems like the sentence should be written in plain English rather than containing two equations. Can anyone rewrite this sentence in plain English? Thank you very much.
 A: Your intuition seems to be right, since, though I understand what you mean, there are a few mistakes. Mainly, you're missing the hypothesis, or at least it's not stated explicitly. I'm assuming it is stated elsewhere, like in the methods section, but when stating results it's helpful to rerefer to previously established language. As an old advisor said of scientific writing/presenting: "tell them what you'll tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them."
Since this is a one (numerator) degree of freedom test, you seem to be testing for significance of a particular cofactor or variable, what we'd usually call the "X". You can strengthen the argument by specifically referring to the significance test of "X". So rather than refer to the "regression analysis equation" (which is vague and a noun-stack), you could say, "The significance test for X had an F-statistic of 6.220 and a p-value of 0.016". In the next sentence, you can go farther say, "And so we reject the hypothesis that "X" is unassociated with "Y"" if you have a pre-stated alpha level for this analysis which happens to be 0.016... such as, say, 0.049.
It's typically not necessary to state the numerator, denominator degrees of freedom, in fact you can omit the F value altogether.
