+44 (0)1273 732 888
Numbers and finance
Posted by: Cathy Dann
20 / 05 / 14
Last week, in our post on units and spaces, we asked you to take a short survey. We’re delighted to report that 130 people did – and here are the results. Overall, most of you were in favour of closing up the number and unit, with four fifths preferring ‘1.75cm’ to ‘1.75 cm’. However, this […]
07 / 05 / 14
Recently a reader asked us whether it was correct to put a space between a number and a unit (eg ‘4 cm’), or to close them up (‘4cm’). Well, what a can of contradictory worms that turned out to be. When it comes to units of measure, it seems some like to get up close […]
Posted by: Catie Holdridge
11 / 02 / 11
Those who see themselves more as ‘number people’ than ‘word people’ might be surprised to learn that their understanding of numbers is actually dependent on language. New research has found that, without language, it is impossible to properly comprehend larger quantities. The findings come from a study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy […]
28 / 01 / 10
Almost a month into the first year of the new decade and the time may have come to pick a side: is it ‘twenty-ten’ or ‘two thousand and ten’? Most people seem to be automatically going with the latter, but they are wrong to do so, claims one American group. This is NAGG (the National […]
Posted by: Barbara Wilson
24 / 04 / 09
If you watched the recent Horizon programme on BBC Two – 31 March at 9pm to be precise – you can’t have failed to have been moved by the power of maths and how we are literally surrounded by myriad aspects of it in our daily lives. Professor Marcus du Santoy, an Oxford mathematician led […]
Posted by: Rob Ashton
18 / 02 / 09
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. So said Benjamin Disraeli (and later Mark Twain, who was quoting him). Yet the public (and that’s all of us, at one time or another) continues to be sucked in by reports based on spurious logic and ‘facts’ of dubious provenance. If you’ve ever […]
Our newsletter contains proven advice and tips for transforming everything you write at work. Join over 15,000 professionals who receive our best advice for writing documents that help you achieve your goals.