<p>I think they should be on-topic here. Notation can greatly assist clarity (or, in some cases, retard it). One good bit of advice I got on reading about models is to follow the subscripts. But that, of course, necessitates that the subscripts are correctly written in the first place.</p>

<p>As an aside, the professor who taught ANOVA to me (and many others) was not aided in his exposition by the fact that, on the board, his i's and j's (and sometimes his k's) all looked identical. </p>
