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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.














  • tiramichu@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzperspective
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    3 months ago

    The problem is the layout.

    It needs horizontal dividing lines to show that the bodies are presented in pairs at the same scale.

    When you first look at it, it seems like all six are in one picture at the same scale, then you start noticing things appearing twice, and think “hang on that’s not right” and work it out, but just two lines would have solved it immediately.

    Design, people! Design!