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Writing Numbers For Business Documents
When crafting business reports and documents, numbers can be one of the trickiest items to include in your text. How exactly do you write them so it doesn’t erode both the readability and professionalism of your documents?
As a rule, all numbers smaller than 10 are usually spelled out in words. Filling your copy with single digit numerals will just leave your paragraphs looking odd – as if you’re poring through a math textbook instead of whatever it is you’re actually composing. Similarly try to avoid starting sentences with a number. If you must to do it, spell out the number in words, regardless of how long it is.
Apart from the above, there aren’t really any other hard-and-fast guideline in the English language for writing out numbers, which means every other way of implementing them into your documents will likely be accepted without any objections from an English writing software. There are quite a few things you can do, however, to make sure your emails, reports and other business materials read considerably better.
One word numbers (ten, fifty) typically read better in the middle of sentences when spelled out. Anything longer will need to be written in their numeric format. While commas are not mandatory, using them will improve your text’s readability, especially when your document includes plenty of large numbers.
Any rounded number over a million needs to be written using a number along with a word (e.g. $2 billion). Writing all those zeros, especially if you don’t use commas, can be quite painful to the eyes. In a similar way, sentences where two numbers need to be written next to each other best work either spelled out or done in combination (e.g. one $15,000 check).
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