Numbers
Credit: Image by kenteegardin on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Using numbers in articles is often crucial, yet they can seem tedious to approach. Journalists need to be able to use them accurately, without making them laborious for readers to interpret.

Getting figures wrong can skew the piece altogether, so understanding how to deal with them confidently is essential.

In this article on Poynter, Vicki Krueger, marketing communications manager at The Poynter Institute, provides some guidelines for how to tackle numbers when including them in articles.

Krueger emphasises the importance of keeping transparency and accuracy intact when rounding off figures, and using common sense when handling smaller numbers.

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