Presenting Data: How to Communicate Your Message Effectively

Chapter 4Numbers in text

For many users, the presentation of the numerical message in either tables or charts is difficult to understand with the loss of the fundamental message. This may be a product of poor presentation which can be corrected by following the guidance of Chapters 2 and 3: the result should be tables and charts that are both well-presented and from which it is easy to extract the message. For other users, it may be that they have an aversion to tables and charts and prefer the written word with numbers included in the text.

The purpose of including numerical information in any document is to describe a situation or to present a message. Without the numerical information, the description or presentation becomes vague. So we have statements like

• Immigration has increased massively.
• Many people die from obesity.
• The work had a major impact on residents.
• Banks will flood into the city.

But what does ‘massively’, ‘many’, ‘major’ or ‘flood’ actually mean? Are they backed up by the numbers? How can the user put the statements into some kind of scale to know whether they should be concerned about the information being presented or not?

When numbers are described effectively, the message in the data is clearly understood by the user. But what does the producer have to do to the numbers to make them understandable? We begin by looking at the basic principles of including numbers in text applying the principles introduced in the first chapter to illustrate changes ...