Numbers

Discussion in 'Word Mechanics' started by Trilby, Jun 19, 2011.

  1. lostinwebspace

    lostinwebspace Active Member

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    Does anybody have any thoughts on how to phrase the rest of my numbers above? Hyphenation, capitalization, etc.?
     
  2. Marjatta

    Marjatta New Member

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    Wow, that's a bit of a Catch-22!

    Are you writing science fiction?

    I remember in Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man, he would use numerals for years but then spell out other numbers, even in the same sentence. For example, "In 1900, when I was twenty years old..."

    On the other hand, he also wrote this: "Forty-eight hours ago, back in Space Sector Seventy-nine DFS, off Planet One in this system, our ship..."

    In The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, one of the sentences is: "English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2." (Notice he didn't write "August 2nd.")

    Jeffery Deaver, in Speaking in Tongues, writes: "...grocery store near the exit ramp off I-66..." and "...it sported a live current of 500 volts..."

    Bad Company, by Jack Higgins, includes: "By his wife, he was, of course, referring to his mistress, Eva Braun, whom he had married around midnight on the 28th." Then again, elsewhere in the novel, he writes: "Von Berger's father, a major general, had been killed during the Polish campaign in 'thirty-nine, elevating Max suddenly..."

    Looking back on the days before PCs and Macs, Windows (and even DOS, for that matter), it's tough to figure out how authors would have written something like "memory block 0x0000000CF" because the technology didn't even exist back then. Even if they did know how to write it, it likely wouldn't have meant much to previous generations. (In The Prisoner, was it Number 6 or Number Six? I can't even remember now, nor does it matter to me much.)

    I also find that many authors from days of yore seemed to express things pretty much how they felt comfortable expressing them, without much concern over consistency ... as long as their reader "got" what they were trying to say.

    I think you may need to be a bit of a pioneer in this respect, unless you can find similar contemporary books written by others, especially the bestsellers.

    Whatever you decide to go with in terms of punctuation and such, your book sounds fascinating already!

    Marjatta
    :)
     

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