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”).
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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.
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.
Oh damn that’s a sensical format. I love it and may put my recipes in it once I start writing them properly
1/2 pound (225 g)
What kind of insanity is this a pound is 500g.
2 cups (390 g) rice
Your cups weigh 195g a piece? Reasonable for stoneware, I guess. But why are you telling me and what does it have to do with the mass of rice?
Cooking is just applied chemistry, after all.
I’ve seen Breaking Bad, yes
Yeah that’s fair. I personally prefer the first one, but I can see how it makes sense to not use digits there.
+1 ∆ for you (change my view points, a thing from r/changemyview)
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.
I was taught you only spell out numbers ten and under, so I would write it:
Breakfast at the Thompson’s was a busy affair; 12 eggs and six rounds of toast for their three sets of boisterous twins.
yeah the first, we don’t need letters when we have numbers
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.
How is that unclear?
its a little ableist…
But unlike eight 13 is above ten
But 8% and 13% are both below 10
So is 999%
And I’ve just learned percent is under two layers of keyboard menus so that’s just fantastic.
Do you write thirteen per cent?
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…
not to mention the fact that it’s written in russian!
Oh damn, that is some nails on a chalkboard level stuff.
I do this to iterate people
they must find it quite repetitive…
God damnit. Ya know what. I’m not fixing it
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.
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
The German standard is to write out everything up to 12 and as English also doesn’t say one-teen and two-teen that’s how I always did it. (why not tenty-one btw? be consistent your numbers are all weird)
Engineer here.
Typically when I type out professional emails or documents that contain numerical values, I write out the number followed by the digits in brackets if it is ten [10] or below for cases of amount, unless I am listing out the counts of items, then I only use digits.
“The updated electrical design will require three [3] new, pad-mount 500kVA transformers to replace the three [3] existing 225kVA transformers,each located on floors four, five, and six.”
Can I ask why, though? I’m also an engineer and I just never spell it out, if I can avoid it (so far, luckily, haven’t had push back since I’m on delivery and not proposals or anything like that.)
To me, it’s just more annoying to read it as words, and no matter what you do, mistakes can still happen, including when it’s spelled out.
Just my 2 cents.
I work in MEP and our emails are always considered legal documents as they can be used as evidence if ever we are taken to court. So we always treat them very technical and try to over explain everything so clients/plan reviewers/contractors can’t misinterpret. It’s kind of an old school thing, but the head of our department is an old school guy.
u mean your “2¢”…
Ur*
ur*
I only spell out numbers as the first word of a sentence because idk how to capitalize in that situation.
I’ll write out a count without a digit if it’s immediately next to a value. Like without other qualifiers: “three 500 kVA transformers”, versus “3 500 kVA transformers” (horrible), or even “three [3] 500 kVA transformers” (acceptable, but perhaps cluttered)
(Also note the space between value and unit—technically required but I’m not consistent about it)
There are exceptions to every rule. Sometimes it ends up being “between five and 15” which is psychotic.
“One and eight hundred and fifty two thousandths”.
Or
“1.852”
You get to decide what’s efficient to communicate a specific value based on the criticality of precision and the format of communication.
Like it or not, but peak-compatibility IS peak-efficiency when it comes to language.
1.852 all the way in every single context. I will die on this hill haha
We die on that hill together, brother!
I especially hate what we the Czechs do. We mostly read numbers the same (21 = twenty one), but then once every blue moon some dimwit says 21 like “one and twenty” like he’s fucking German or something. German is bad enough, but why do we have to mix it???
I thought it was french that did that
French is even more special.
Tho like I said before, it’s not perfectly accurate. In Czech 90 + 2 is the official way, but many people around Prague and closer to Germany do in fact occasionally say 2 + 90.
Caveat, not including multipliers, like “273 billion”
You mean 273e9?
More like 273G in engineering.
TIL engineers use gazillion
It’s a highly technical term for “lots and lots.”
Only if you have a unit.
273 GW 👍
Else, looks kind weird, to my eyes anyway. But fair point haha
Euros count as a unit 😏
3.5 G€
Ok, while I’m being facetious, let’s do it for dollars too. G$3.5… oh that’s horrible!
Too bad people underuse it.
Separating the prefixes from the unities is very useful even in calculations where both are there.
You do you, but this is a big no-no from my point of view.
For example separating the prefix m from mm would be rather confusing, and look like another unit.
You can, however, put 10^x wherever you like 👍
I’ve never seen that outside of videogames
I’ll allow billion, but personally my preference is using powers of 10 or unit prefixes.
Just I’m not gonna be mad about the newspaper writing 3.5 billion dollars.
Unless that number means something different from US$ 3.5e9.
If you are one of those people that think your country uses the other “billion”, just don’t.
Touche, yeah, I’d totally be on board if everyone just uses $3.5*10⁹ or $3.5e9. Good luck getting it catch on outside eng/science circles though haha
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.
Yeah I’m with you on this. I’m not sure if this was clear in the meme (I am an engineer), but I think the style guides can go shove it. I’m always going to write the symbols, not spell it out.
Three and four hundred fifteen quintillion five hundred ninety two quadrillion six hundred fifty three trillion five hundred eighty nine billion seven hundred ninety three million two hundred thirty eight thousand four hundred sixty three sextillionths
Is less than ten
Not just an engineer thing though. Everyone finds it obnoxious.
In nineteen ninety eight The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and he plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
**Sixteen feet
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.
Isn’t that part of the reason we have Dewey/LoC system?
Those are for academic books, not novels. And you’d still sort everything within a category alphabetically by author and then by title (usually)
I found Larry Flynt’s autobiography at my university’s library using the LCCN system.
Then again that’s a University library so it might be different.
Yeah haha, this is why it came to my mind. In this case it’s a title, so not really for the purpose of being used as a number.
Though, I suppose I didn’t specify this
00, 01, 10 there i did it
Next you’re gonna ask me to use actual scientific notation instead of to the most relevant 3 decimal points. I will not use your bullshit centimeters, that’s just 10 mms
Absolutely, mm > cm all the way. Other than you putting s at the end of mm, we don’t take the Lord’s (metric) name in vain around here.
I do feel kind of sorry for East Asia though, since their languages seperate at intervals of 10⁴, rather than 10³. The giga and mega prefixes just make no sense there. 1 GW = 10,0000,0000 W and 1 MW = 100,0000.
Language strikes again
Not sure, but perhaps they would prefer a prefix of 10-4 rather than mm (10-3).
Wtf I’ve never heard of this, what a cursed way to notate large numbers
It’s not cursed, it’s just a different way of grouping. Nothing about grouping in multiples of 10³ is a more natural grouping, were just more used to it.
And I’m pointing out how metric prefixes are actually euro-centric, and that’s annoying for them. But there’s nothing fundamentally worse about breaking digits in groups of 4, rather than 3
1,000,000,000,000 = 1,0000,0000,0000 (1012) [Meme of black and white muscular arms embracing.]
Look up the indian system, now that’s actually cursed.
Nein
For manufacturing I’ve taken to using spelled out numbers when quantities and names both use numbers. Four 4s rather than 4 4s. Makes it harder for someone to speed through an email and get the completey wrong information.
