Editing Guide to technical writing (section)

===Various academic words===
There are a number of academic words that you need to be aware how to correctly use:

* '''Prove.'''   Avoid using the words "proof" and "prove" unless you are writing closed-form mathematics.  In the physical world you cannot ultimately prove anything; we only increase confidence in models for given circumstances. Models are always subject to revision, especially when new measuring instruments open up a greater range of new circumstances.  Therefore, for any physical discussion and experiments, always use "show" or "demonstrate" instead of "prove." On the other hand the mathematical world is not real, it is artificial. In maths you can make proofs as the mathematical space is well defined.  In the physical world we do not know the extent of physical parameter spaces, as our instruments are not omnipotent. So we can never make closed form proofs in the sense that we can with mathematics. The physical world is always open-ended in that sense.

* '''Law.'''  This is used in the sense of "Newton's Laws"  for example.  There actually is no such thing as a law in science. Use of this word is a mistake of tradition. All "laws" named by humans are subject to revision. Therefore avoid using this term where you can.  Only use it if it is already commonly used, such as in "Ohm's Law." In mathematics, however, there really are laws such as the "distributive law"  and "law of exponents."  Because mathematics is imaginary and not physical, we can have laws that are guaranteed to always hold.

* '''Ansatz.''' This is a mathematical or physical starting guess, that you later verify by your results.

* '''Paradox.''' This is something that is true but appears to contain a contradiction. Most paradoxes can be resolved and it can be shown that the contradiction was not real in the first place. However, there are a few paradoxes that seem to have no solution. If you are talking about a paradox that has been solved, then to make this clear it is better to call it an ''apparent paradox''. An exception is when referring to an apparent paradox by name; for example, "Simpson's paradox"  is the name of an apparent paradox.   It is just its name, and no one is suggesting that it is a real paradox. To say "Simpson's apparent paradox"  is too long, and so we shorten the name for brevity. Note that apparent paradoxes are sometimes called ''veridical'' paradoxes, and this was a term coined by Quine.

* '''Heuristic.''' This word has specific meaning in education and psychology.  But here we will only focus on what we mean in engineering and computer science. A heuristic is a search or optimization technique based on a set of strategies, rather than a brute force exhaustive algorithm, resulting in rough solutions that are good starting points. A metaheuristic is the same thing, but not tailored to a specific problem; a metaheuristic can be used more generally.