How to Write Numbers with Impact
One of the things I’ve been struggling with recently is how to talk about data in an engaging way.
The thing about numbers is that they seem so plain. Their significance varies; 1,000 views might be amazing for a small YouTuber, but should Pewdiepie only get that many views on a video, there’s something severely wrong happening.
To help convey heft and really make numbers pop, here are some ways that I’ve learned to translate numbers.
Use Analogies
I’ll share examples with you from Make Numbers Count by Chip Heath and Karla Starr, the interesting book where I learned this.
During Karla Starr’s middle school days, she encountered a statistic about how much water in the world is safe for humans to consume. The number-heavy version of the stat is this:
“97.5% of the world’s water is salinated. Of the 2.5% that’s fresh, over 99% is trapped in glaciers and snowfields. In total, only .025% of the water on the globe is actually drinkable by humans and animals.”
Percentages, am I right?
But then someone translated that to her in a way that she would never forget.
Imagine a gallon jug filled with water with three ice cubes next to it. All of the water in the jug is salt water. The ice cubes are the only fresh water, and humans can only drink the drops that are melting off of each.
It’s much easier to understand numbers when you use common visuals.
Liken it to Something Unexpected
Here’s another example from the book.
There was a New York Times articles pu
There was a 2018 New York Times article that talked about a bunch of data and statistics, from politics to movies to business that was intended to illustrate how unequal things are. Instead of assaulting the reader with numbers, they took another approach. Here’s one way one of the stats could’ve been written.
A very small percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
That isn’t too bad, right? (I mean the sentence structure, not the context; that’s terrible). But the article took another approach.
Among Fortune 500 CEOs, there are more men named James than there are women.
I felt disgusted and appalled the first time I read this. The statistic written this way made it much clearer and more impactful.
A Jolly example
Since this technique blew my mind, I wanted to try it myself. Let me know what you think of this.
A standard iPhone 13 costs ₱50,990 on Apple’s website. I wanted to liken that number to something to make it more tangible (because goodness knows I have that much on-hand). So I chose a 1 piece Jollibee Chickenjoy meal with fries and a drink. That costs ₱129. Much more accessible.
Now, suppose you eat that meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.
If you had the budget for an iPhone 13, you would be eating Jollibee thrice a day, every day, for 4 months.
That seems wrong somehow but I crunched the numbers it added up roughly to that amount. That’s a lot of chicken.
Writing for Humans
Numbers isn’t our first language. You’d think that since we use it every day that we’d get the hang of it, but we don’t really. Statistics and findings whiz by my face every day when I want to make articles credible, but none have impacted me as much as how words and visualizing of those numbers have.
So when you’re talking to someone about numbers, try to repackage it in a way that they’ll remember it. Use fried chicken meals, perhaps?
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