Quotes on simplifying stats
What writers & others say
“Numbers, when they’re large enough, simply blow our mental fuses. People often find anything with an ‘-illion’ on the end incomprehensible.”
— Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, authors of The Numbers Game
“Great clots of numbers dropped into a story with a steam shovel create a wall of abstraction.”
— William Blundell, author, The Art and Craft of Feature Writing
“Big numbers fuzz our brains, and that is just as true in business as it is in public policy.”
— Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick
“Speaking in ‘millions’ and ‘billions’ is like your second year of Spanish: You’ve memorized the vocabulary, but it’s hard to think in the language.”
— Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick
“The challenge of communicating the significance of numbers — and acting on them — is to find ways to bring them closer to people’s day-to-day experience.”
— Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick
“Some commentators have tried various ways to put [numbers into] perspective — if you laid those bills end to end, how many times would they circle the earth? (If there’s one thing people have a keen intuition about, it’s the earth’s circumference, right?)”
— Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick
“How can you relate to this monstrous figure in the daily-life zone”
— Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick
“We’ve all heard stats like this one (which is real): 27 billion disposable diapers are used each year in the United States — enough to stretch all the way to the moon and back seven times. What to say about this? For starters, it would be a funny joke to play on the astronauts.”
— Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick
“A good statistic is one that aids a decision or shapes an opinion. For a stat to do either of those, it must be dragged within the everyday. That’s your job — to do the dragging.”
— Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick
“Few members of our audience turn to The Oregonian because they’re craving a good story problem.”
— Jack Hart, managing editor, The Oregonian
“Numbers without context, especially large ones with many zeros trailing behind, are about as intelligible as vowels without consonants.”
— Daniel Okrent, The New York Times ombudsman
“Information is absorbed in direct proportion to its vividness.”
— Diane West, president and co-founder of 2Connect
“Every time you feel your fingers reaching for the top row of the keyboard, ask, ‘What’s it like?'”
— Ann Wylie, writing coach, Wylie Communications
Make Magic With Metaphor
Charm readers with analogies and comparisons
It’s tempting to call metaphor the magic spell in a writer’s repertoire, the Penn and Teller of the page.
Metaphor has the power to persuade far better than literal language. It lets you say in five words what would otherwise take five paragraphs to explain.
It makes readers’ brains light up, helps them think more broadly about your message — even (ahem!) makes you look more attractive.
At Master the Art of the Storyteller — our two-day hands-on creative-writing master class on July 25-26 in Portland — you’ll want to master a few tricks before you step onto the stage. In this session, you’ll learn how to charm readers with the magic of metaphor:
- Get the zombies out of your message: Don’t let Dead and Dead2 metaphors eat your readers’ brains.
- Craft a compelling metaphor with our fill-in-the-blanks formula.
- Polish your metaphor: Learn which kinds of metaphors to choose, which to avoid and where in your message to place them from 41 academic studies covering 50 years of research.
Learn more about our
Portland master class.
