One of my favourite comedy sketches is “Numberwang” from “That Mitchell and Webb Look”. Numberwang (in case you didn’t know…) is a spoof gameshow in which contestants call out numbers – seemingly at random – until the host declares “That’s Numberwang!”. OK, I know I may not have quite sold it to you, but somehow Mitchell and Webb manage to make this slight joke into something very funny – have a look on YouTube and see what you think.
Anyway, the reason I mention Numberwang is that I was reminded of it the other day when looking through some documents that I needed to review. I was bombarded by more numbers than a Numberwang show, and it got me thinking about the use and abuse of numbers in the context of writing business reports.
Numbers, like all other information, have to earn their place on the page. Let’s take a few examples. ‘Page 1 of 1’ at the bottom of a document is occasionally useful for audit purposes, but for many short and informal documents, page numbering is just clutter. Likewise, version numbers. ‘Draft 1.0’ can so often be either meaningless or misleading. (The whole convention of numbering drafts is a topic in itself. I prefer a first draft to be 0.1 rather than 1.0, but that’s another story…). And try not to number your lists if bullets will do instead: numbering implies a sequence, and nine times out of ten there may actually not be one.
But of course, one of the main ways in which numbers infect documents is through section numbering. Ask yourself if you really do need to number your sections? Will a sharp section title do instead? Maybe a number will help if you need to refer to the document in discussions and reviews, but not all documents are used in this way. And don’t forget that numbering can seriously interrupt the way a document flows: ‘Section 4.3.2’ is a fairly forbidding start to a piece of text.
The cardinal sin (if you will excuse the pun), however, is to use numbered sections to send your reader off on a wild goose chase. ‘See Section 6.1.3 for more details’ suggests to me that there is something wrong: why aren’t the relevant details here, at this point in the text where they are needed? And flicking backwards and forwards to Diagram 3 in Appendix 5.2 (which is no doubt also full of lengthy tables and small print) isn’t much fun either. Now that’s what I’d call Numberwang.
