Excerpted from Reporting & Writing: Basics for the 21st Century (Harcourt, 2000)
Numbers are not just a tool for analysis. Numbers also communicate. Once you’ve figured out the numbers for your story, the next step is to be able to use them clearly in your writing.
No matter how rigorous your analysis, numbers aren’t a story, says Jeff South, a former database editor for the Austin American-Statesman who now teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. As politicians might say, “It’s the content, stupid.”
Words, not data, make a story. Your analysis will shape the story; it might be the foundation for the story. But you must tell the story in a way that connects with people who don’t know a spreadsheet from a cookie sheet. And that means, ironically, telling the story almost as if it didn’t involve computer analysis.
Mathematics is a precise science and requires semantic as well as numerical precision. Even experienced journalists get sloppy when writing about numbers. At The New York Times, reporters have been known to use the word “shortfall,” — which means the quantity or extent by which something falls short — to mean shortage, decline, unpaid bill, difference, unmet budget, request, debt, remainder and deficit. Avoid jargon. Bureaucrats may use terms such as “revenue” and “expenditures”; keep it simple with “income” and “spending.”
Here are some more tips to help you use numbers effectively in your writing:
- Comparison shop. When you do use a figure in a story, put it in context by comparing it to something else. A number has little significance on its own; its true meaning comes from its relative value, says Paul Hemp, an editor for The Boston Globe and author of Ten Practical Tips for Business and Economic Reporting in Developing Economies.
Whenever Hemp reaches up to the top row of keyboard keys for the numbers 0 through 9, he always stops and asks himself: Compared to what? When you use a statistic, compare it to something people can relate to, such as another time, an earlier year, or another place. That’s what a writer for The Associated Press did in a story about transportation fatalities, by comparing the previous year’s transportation fatalities with the population of communities familiar in three major regions of the country:
“WASHINGTON (AP) Travel in America claimed the lives of more than 44,000 people last year — roughly the population of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Palatine, Ill., or Covina, Calif.”
- Round off and substitute. Economists and financial experts need exact numbers. Readers don’t. So you can say “nearly doubled” or “about one-third” and remain accurate as well as understandable. You don’t need to say that burglaries increased 105 percent when you could say they doubled. If 33 percent of the drivers in fatal crashes had alcohol in their blood, it will be clearer if you write, “One in three drivers had been drinking.”
- Think visual. To help readers understand numbers, it’s often helpful to relate the numbers to something readers can picture. Make quantities visible in the mind’s eye. In an article about the excavation of World War II planes that crashed in the marshes and swamps of the Netherlands, author Les Daly used this vivid picture to convey the enormity of the 7,000 crashes: “To put it another way, the crash of 7,000 aircraft would mean that every square mile of the entire state of New Jersey would have shaken to the impact of a downed plane.”
Other resources on the web:
- The J-Files at Virginia Commonwealth University: Jeff South, former database editor at the Austin American-Statesman, has created a rich and mathphobe-friendly site devoted to computer-assisted reporting. It’s a must-bookmark site for 21st-century journalists. Take the online math quiz and learn your strengths and weaknesses and how to overcome them.
- Check out John Allen Paulos’ home page to experience the wit and wisdom of a mathematician who is also a terrific writer. The author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Literacy and Its Consequences and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Paulos posts recent writings that will comfort math-phobic journalists.
- Statistics Every Writer Should Know: Robert Niles is a journalist who knows how to crunch numbers and, more importantly, how to take the mystery out of statistics. This site explains, in clear and plain English, the meanings and uses of averages (mean and median) and percentage changes.
- Reporters don’t like writing about budgets. For many, says Dave Herzog, an investigative reporter at The Providence Journal, it’s on par with going to the dentist: It’s something we know we have to do, we don’t like doing it, and it’s pretty painful while we are doing it. In this two-parter, Herzog provides a useful primer and a list of tips for writing better budget stories from the paper’s “Power of Words” writing improvement site.
Do you have any examples of stellar writing with numbers? E-mail them to Chip Scanlan at chipscan@poynter.org.
