I recently got a document from a client asking me to ‘review and comment on two (2) different versions of the plan’. I’m not making this up – people still think they need to tell readers that the word ‘two’ means ‘# 2’. Really? Most workplace readers know that and reminding them can be insulting or annoying. It is to me.
Here’s a simple solution. With numerical references ‘zero’ – ‘nine’, write out the words, as in ‘three weeks’ or ‘eight revisions’. For references to ten or greater, use numbers, as in ’20 team members’ or ’11 percent’. But there’s never a good reason to do it two (2) times. Make sense?