Why you shouldn't put numbers in text

Read any piece of business writing, and you're bound to encounter this sort of gibberish:

In the total throughput table, XYZ is ranked at the market leader, with a throughput of 66.3 million units, up from 60.9 million units in 2006, and a global share of 13.3%. ABC is in second position, with 60.3 million units (12.1%) followed by PQR with 54.7 million units (11%), DEF with 43 million units (8.7%) and JKL, which moved 27.3 million units and has a market share of 5.5%.

Business reports typically have dozens of tables. That’s where the numbers should go. We can’t completely avoid putting numbers in the text, but it should be avoided wherever possible. 

Here’s why.

A tour of the Black Museum

Editors of business reports are constantly turning pretentious wankery into something approaching English, in the vain hope that the readers will understand what the writer was trying to say. Sometimes, the process of disentangling a sentence reveals that the writer himself didn't know what he was trying to say.

This blog began life two years ago as an extension of my Twitter feed, which only existed so I could curate the nonsense I sometimes encounter and hopefully share it with anyone who'd appreciate it.

But Twitter doesn't keep tweets forever, so I've collected some of them here for my own enjoyment. You're welcome to enjoy them too. Sometimes I wonder at the thought process that turns what must have been a simple idea into something verbose and vague. If you have any insight into what makes intelligent, articulate people turn their ideas into verbal molasses, do let me know. Sadly, all these are genuine.

Shock news: your toilet is too clean

Another week, another story telling us all the things that are dirtier than a toilet seat. I can't even be bothered to link to it, but don't worry, there'll be another one along in a couple of days. The narrative is always the same: something in your house has more bacteria than your toilet seat. From what I've seen of the research - because, like almost no journalist nowadays, I looked beyond the press release and read the actual research - this is the story that should have run:

Should top journalists write their own stories?

Lee gets his name in the noosepapers

Oh, the irony.

There was a story in the Daily Telegraph last month headlined Top comedians don't write their jokes, claims Stewart Lee. In this shocking exposé, top journalist Rosa Silverman revealed … well, pretty much what it says in the headline. 

In a strange coincidence, only 24 hours before Silverman filed her story, top journalist Jonathan Brown had run a very similar story in the Independent. What made this coinicidence even stranger was that they were reporting part of a talk that the comedian had given several months before.

Lee wasn't happy about this, but it wasn't Silverman or Brown who attracted his ire.

Leveraging your customer experience

There are plenty of companies like Nunwood, using jargon to impress and doing just the opposite. Still, Nunwood is a particularly juicy example.

I found myself exposed to the company's incredible self-delusion in April, when I filled in a survey it had created for my gas and electric company. I looked at its website and found enough there for a whole blog post about meaningless, corporate jargon.

More recently, I looked at the company's Twitter feed. This was too good not to share.

Corporation-speak: a phrasebook

A new language for addressing the public has evolved in recent decades. It has no official name, but its most essential feature is insincerity. It began as a dialect of English, but it passes the test of being a separate language because it is now incomprehensible to English speakers.

There are two main dialects of this new language: 'Bureaucratic Obscurantism' and 'Corporate Bollocks'.

Confused words, part 3

Here's a less-than-magnificent seven pairs (or, in one case, trio) of commonly confused words.

Compose / Comprise
I made a horrible mistake on Twitter recently. I pasted a phrase from a draft report where the writer had made the common error of writing "comprises of". Then I 'corrected' it and only did half the job. 
 
Oops. The resulting firestorm almost got me thrown out of the International Siblinghood of Grammar Pedants. I was only saved by the fact that this was an error of vocabulary, not grammar, and the ISG is nothing if not a stickler for the rules. Still, it makes me shiver just to think about it.

If a thing is made up of other things, either "it is composed of" them or "it comprises" them (no 'of'). Similarly, the things that make up a bigger thing "compose" it. But nothing can "be comprised of" or "comprise of" anything else.

So, you can say the following:

The alphabet comprises 26 letters
The alphabet is composed of 26 letters
Twenty-six letters compose the alphabet (awkward, I know, but technically correct)

But not:

The alphabet is comprised of 26 letters
The alphabet comprises of 26 letters

If that's too hard to remember, just remember that 'of' never goes with 'comprise'.

Interment / Internment
The dead are interred. The living are interned, by becoming 'internal' to an organisation (or, in the case of the disastrous anti-terrorism policy in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, imprisoned without trial).

An interment is a funeral, where the star of the show is put in terra, i.e. in the ground. 

Phase / Faze
The British suffer more than Americans from the belief that the letter 'Z' is somehow vulgar, so they're more likely to write "unphased" when they mean "unfazed". Since a phase is a set period of time in which something specific happens, being phased should only happen to traffic lights, or possibly the villains in Star Trek. 

Raise / Raze
You've got to wonder at the logical failure of anyone who writes "raised to the ground", unless they're talking about leaving the basement. It helps if you know a bit of French: razer means to shave; but surely we're all familiar enough with razors? 

Peak / Peek
There's an irritating Twitter robot called @StealthMountain that will correct you for writing "sneak peak" instead of "sneak peek". It's had to do this more than 300,000 times in 18 months, which is about once every two minutes. I suppose it's a necessary public service, but it's annoying if you were only pointing out someone else's error. It could have been worse: the robot might have called itself @ClandestineOrgasm.

Ordnance / Ordinance
Again, one little letter makes a difference. An ordinance is an official decree, and all acts of Parliament were called ordinances during the eleven years when England was a republic (1649-60). The UK's official map-maker is often mistakenly called the Ordinance Survey - presumably people think this refers to some law - but it's actually the Ordnance Survey. Get it wrong when typing the URL and you'll end up in a fake site full of malware. 

For security reasons, this map is not available in France

Ordnance is ammunition (as in, "the battlefield was littered with spent ordnance") or artillery. Some people have suggested a sinister reason for the British Board of Ordnance getting the job of surveying the country, as if the government was planning to impose martial law (after all, the project began during the panic following the French Revolution), but the simpler answer is that the government feared an invasion and wanted to give the British artillery an advantage on any battlefield in southern England. Once Napoleon had been safely dispatched, the Ordnance went ahead and surveyed the rest of the country, since they had nothing better to do and no one was better qualified to do the job. 

Cite / Site / Sight
I always feel slightly dirty if I read a newspaper article about bad grammar and then go looking for mistakes. Hunting down errors in the comments section is even worse. It's like pornography: one has a perfectly legitimate interest in the subject, but it still feels like a cheap way of gaining fulfilment. 

There's also the danger of making a mistake yourself, so I restrained myself from correcting Ginghead. He or she had replied to a comment below a Guardian article on 'Grammar rules everyone should follow' with the following:
Ginghead's use of "sighted" might have been right, of course, if HardcorePrawn had actually seen the example he mentioned. But Ginghead insists that he can't have done so. The word he was looking for is 'cite': "to quote or refer to (a passage, book, or author) in substantiation as an authority, proof, or example" (Collins).

Sight and site, while normally nouns, can also be verbs: 'sight' as a more forceful form of 'see' while 'site' means to put in place, as in:

"As the building site came into sight, she sighted where her department was to be sited."

I'll leave it to any German-speaking readers to concoct a joke about how 'site' is a place while zeit is time. They can then argue with the theoretical physicists about whether there's really any difference. 

See also:
Nine (or eighteen) commonly mistaken words: Loose, Infer, Forgo, Empathise, Lay, Principal, Pry, Fare, Discrete
More Confused Words Dowse, Slander, Illicit, Scold, Founder, Flail
Mistaken words: couples or just good friends?  Treble, Choose, Discomfit, Last/Past, Alternate, Forbear, Cancel/Postpone, Market(place), Affect
(yes there are three, so this post is technically part 4: proof that maths fails me as often as words. Still, even the Vatican can't number its popes properly)

Moral: Feel free to set up your own Twitter robot, but don't tread on the toes, and definitely not the foothills, of @StealthMountain.