Common Mistakes in Papers for Publication Part 5 – Numbers (3)

This is the third and final post on numbers (see below for links to the previous two posts).

Whether to write numbers as figures or words, put abbreviations before or after them, or leave spaces between symbols preceding or following them is all far more complicated than we might at first imagine.

It’s also easy to get confused as style-guide rules and recommendations can differ and many non-native speakers writing or translating into English simply copy usage in their own language, which is often not correct. As a translator and editor, I’ve written these posts on numbers to highlight errors I’ve come across in my work and also to clear my own confusion between source usage and UK and US English preferences.

As always, I’ve used The Chicago Manual of Style for US English and New Hart’s Rules (part of the New Oxford Style Manual) for UK English.

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Common Mistakes in Papers for Publication Part 4 – Numbers (2)

Common Mistakes in Papers for Publication is a series within the Bite-sized Tips series.

In the first and second instalments, I presented some common errors I find in the academic papers I revise or edit. Although they are generally made by non-native speakers of English in the texts I see, a lot of them can trip us up as well, especially as there are often differences between US and UK usage and everything can become quite muddled.

For the US English rules, I use The Chicago Manual of Style and for UK English New Hart’s Rules, which is part of the New Oxford Style Manual.

In the third instalment I looked at some issues with numbers. As it’s a vast, complicated area and lots of mistakes crop up, I’ve divided the focus on numbers into three parts. This is the second of those parts on dates and currencies.

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Common Mistakes in Papers for Publication Part 3 – Numbers (1)

I spend a lot of my work time improving academic texts. This can involve revising the translations that authors have produced of their own work or editing their non-native efforts at writing directly into English. Unfortunately, the results are never error-free and, as I mostly revise and edit articles and papers written by Spanish speakers, I repeatedly come across the same mistakes.

In the first instalment of this series within a series, I highlighted ten of these common mistakes including the use of etc. and et al.

In the second, I focused on whether to use data is or data are, some punctuation problems and issues with capitalisation.

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