Extreme Writing Makeover - How do you write numbers?

Pick a number, any number.
Do you believe the numbers?
I have a number in mind.  If you do not have a number, we will use mine.  (This line makes the difference between you, the billionaire manager, and me, the analyst).

This is week #44 of a 52-week online writing course, "Extreme Writing Makeover", led by publication coach Daphne-Gray Grant.  If you have not followed up on previous mention of her course in this blog, I urge you to do so.  No matter at what stage of learning you are as a writer, you will learn to write better and faster, beginning with week one of her course.

This week's headline: "Don't numb your readers with numbers".
Last week: "Why and how you must eliminate cliches".
The first line in this blog post may be a cliché.  The bit about analysts and managers was like a cliché at 3M.  I heard it often.  I was the analyst.

Notice how many ways I wrote numbers in the preceding two paragraphs. 3M has to be written that way.  The corporate name is 3M, not 3M Company, and not the name spelled out, Minnesota, Mining, and Manufacturing?

I paused in the writing here, copied and pasted my work into Microsoft Word 2010.  I have the grammar and spelling checker ready to analyze as I type.  There are no errors highlighted for any of my numbers. There is a problem with the spelling of cliché without a diacritical mark.

Numbers dominated my careers as a U.S. Air Force Weather Officer, and as an analyst at 3M.
When I retired from 3M , I saved a huge three-ring binder we published as a user guide. The guide explained how to use the service measurement system I programmed. More than one hundred pages displayed images of menus, criteria fields to be filled in by the user, and examples of every report the program could generate.  I wrote the content of the guide. I wrote the logic in hundreds of computer programs that ran in the background.  A professional IT programmer made it all work online. We hired a professional publishing service to finish the layout and print it.

Imagine an audience involving fifty-two countries. Supply Chain Management specialists, all of them managers or supervisors represented transportation, distribution, warehousing, inventory management, customs clearance, and so on. They had to understand the numbers. They communicated to executives who don't read reports past the first paragraph, and will not read anything longer than one page. 

Somehow, I was a popular guy with management, because I could communicate meaning.  I had the numbers they needed. A picture was worth more than a thousand words, especially in a video conference.  Our Japanese team depended on the graphics projected to be the same format every month.  They had the benefit of a nine-hour time difference to read the printed reports I sent before the meeting, and the reports had to have the same format every time. 

Language differences were important.  On one occasion our U.S. team leader sat in a video conference room in Brussels at midnight, with a German team leader at his side, while the Japanese team were assembled at 8 AM in an office near Tokyo. 

 Why?  We had accomplishments to report.  We had saved the company millions of dollars.  We had reduced the time it took to move exports from the middle of the U.S. to Europe or Japan. Shipments via truck, rail, and ocean could get to Europe in nine days, where it used to take forty-five days.  To Japan, we could do it consistently in thirty days, where it had been as much as seventy-two days and unreliable.

We had a story to tell.  That is the lesson for this week. Try not to start a report with numbers.  Tell the story. 

There is more to a story.  Capture the audience. Here is the lead posted on Facebook yesterday by Tom Skilling, WGN TV weatherman.  He posted a colorful graphic to go with it.

"This is a stunning forecast--not one you see everyday. The immense dome of hot air, depicted on this Sunday evening upper air forecast is to take shape across a huge swath of the US. 90+ deg temps are predicted in sections of 34 states by late this weekend by our computer forecast models. Chicago's 141 yr observational record shows the area's hottest wx has historically occurred from July 16-29."

Here is the link to my publication coach:
http://www.publicationcoach.com