cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21049862
The only numbers I will ever spell are one and zero, and only when using them as a pronoun, or for emphasis, respectively.
Is there ever a reason to not to use symbols when dealing with numbers? Why would “fourteen whatevers” ever be preferable to “14 whatevers”. It’s just so much easier to read numbers as symbols, not spelled out.
(Caveat, not including multipliers, like “273 billion”).
Context is everything, IMO.
In engineering work, numbers should always be digits. In prose, numbers should be spelled out.
Breakfast at the Thompson’s was a busy affair; 12 eggs and 6 rounds of toast for their 3 sets of boistrous twins.
Compared to
Breakfast at the Thompson’s was a busy affair; twelve eggs and six rounds of toast for their three sets of boistrous twins.
To me it’s pretty clear which of those reads better and more naturally as prose; digits really ‘jump out’ on the page, and while that is great for engineering texts, it is incongruent and distracting for prose.
In your example tho, you want those numbers to stand out. The reason the affair was busy, was because of the numbers. You want the numbers to jump out, because that’s the important detail.
I appreciate your point, but I still believe spelled-out numbers work better.
In prose, especially fiction writing, the ideal case is that the words themselves slide neatly out of the way and become invisible, leaving only a picture in the reader’s mind. Generally speaking, anything distracting is therefore counter-productive for fiction. Strange fonts and strange typesetting, while interesting, take the reader out of the prose. There’s a reason almost every fiction book you pick up from the shelf uses Garamond.
In an engineering context, remembering exactly “12 eggs, 6 toast” is probably the most important thing, and numeric digits assist in that. In fiction however it doesn’t matter if, by the next page, the reader has forgotten exactly how many eggs there were; the important aspect is to convey the sense of a large and chaotic family, and the overall impression is more important than the detail.
Thats why although the numbers are important for setting the scene, we really don’t want them to jump out and steal attention. We don’t want anything at all to have undue prominence, because the reader needs to process the paragraph as a cohesive whole, and see the scene, not the specific numbers.
Somewhat relevant to your example, recipes should have numbers in digits too. (But then again recipes are basically an engineering text.)
recipes are basically an engineering text
I would love to see more systematic recipe formats.
Around 15-20 years ago there was a website called “Cooking for Engineers” that used a table format for recipes that was pretty clever, and a very useful diagram for how to visualize the steps (at least for someone like me). I don’t think he ever updated the site to be mobile friendly but you can see it here:
He describes the recipe in a descriptive way, but down at the bottom it lists ingredients and how they go together in a chart that shows what amounts to use, what ingredients go into a particular step, what that step is, and how the product of that step feeds into the next step.
What kills me is when people will mix the two in a single context.
“Between eight and 13 percent”
NO. If you’re writing one number in digits, you need to write them all the same way.
Sometimes it’s actually better to mix them.
Example from Purdue Owl:
Unclear: The club celebrated the birthdays of 6 90-year-olds who were born in the city.
Clearer: The club celebrated the birthdays of six 90-year-olds who were born in the city.
In general, use numerals to express numbers 10 and above, and use words to express numbers zero through nine.
Example given:
students were in the third, sixth, eighth, 10th, and 12th grades
Your example does not follow the style guide and is an example of when to use digits
Percentages 50% 75%–80%
If you’re a professional writer, you should be following the style guide and this is explicitly spelled out by the APA.
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/numbers/numerals
This kills me, but its not as bad as the habit of new articles/print authors to switch between first and last names of the same person within a few sentences.
They will introduce Jeff Snoms, and then refer to them has “Jeff” and “Snoms” interchangeably for no discernable reason. It gets really maddening when they are doing it with 3 or 4 people, so suddenly the story has 2x as many characters involved.
Wait till you read russian novels, where everyone’s got 3 names and 2 official nickname everyone is expected to know…
This is how I approach it. If there’s only a few numbers mentioned and they’re small, write them out. If there’s many numbers mentioned, then they should all be numbers. And I catch myself messing it up all the time and going back to edit the one number I put in there because it just looks wrong. Context is everything, really.
Spell out numbers under 10, but not when it’s divisible by three or five.
In nineteen ninety eight The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and he plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
Caveat, not including multipliers, like “273 billion”
You mean 273e9?
Only if you have a unit.
273 GW 👍
Else, looks kind weird, to my eyes anyway. But fair point haha
Too bad people underuse it.
Separating the prefixes from the unities is very useful even in calculations where both are there.
I’ll allow billion, but personally my preference is using powers of 10 or unit prefixes.
Just I’m not gonna be mad about the newspaper writing 3.5 billion dollars.
Unless that number means something different from US$ 3.5e9.
If you are one of those people that think your country uses the other “billion”, just don’t.
