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”).
I spell out numbers when I want to emphasize them.
Take George Orwell for example:
“Nineteen Eighty-Four” has a lot more of a punch to it than just “1984.”
I used to work in a library, and I hate this. We used to have both a “2001: a space Odyssey” and a “two thousand and one: a space oddesey”, sorted based on the spelling.
Those are for academic books, not novels. And you’d still sort everything within a category alphabetically by author and then by title (usually)
There are exceptions to every rule. Sometimes it ends up being “between five and 15” which is psychotic.
I somehow have “spell out if less than 13” burned in my mind from somewhere in middle school. No idea if it is right, but so far it has worked.
Any number that I write down is a number. I am not writing novels, the numbers I write down are supposed to be easy you find. You look through the document to find numbers, that is easy to do.
Nein
