4 ms·

> spans pages 128–34. Who omits the 1 from the second number?! That is aweful!

• mkehrt 2y ago
  What if it's 124 to 127? would you really type 124–127, or 124–7?
  • wavemode 2y ago
    > would you really type 124–127 literally yes
  • rossant 2y ago
    The latter, I believe.
  • eCa 2y ago
    > would you really type 124–127? Yes, every time. The clarity for the reader is more important than the time I save by leaving out '12'.
• rossant 2y ago
  When I was editing an academic book published by a well-known university press, we were all asked to do that for the references. (And my colleagues, all doctors and lawyers, only knew Word and entered the references manually.)
• crazygringo 2y ago
  Who keeps the 1? You write pages 1,003–4, instead of typing out 1,003–1,004 which is just unnecessary. Works the same with two digits, or even three: pp. 1,899–902. This is standard practice and arguably clearer. I've only ever seen it done with page ranges, though. I'm not sure if it's done with year ranges? E.g. 1984–5? Or 1989–92? You work with page ranges constantly in academia, I just don't see year ranges much in any form.
  • lucgommans 2y ago
    Literally never seen this (wish I could grep all comments I've ever replied to) and I do not understand what makes you say that it's clearer when it's dropping information, making it relative rather than a fully qualified number In speech, it's common, and misunderstandings are usually not a problem (if you're not monologuing on a recording) because someone will just ask; but in writing it looks like the range is the wrong way around. Maybe I expect more care in writing because the feedback loop is longer, or maybe it's just habit and I think it's wrong in writing because I never see it?
    • LegionMammal978 2y ago
      MLA-style citations call for abbreviating page ranges in that way. I mostly see it in literary papers, and not many other contexts, so it would be easy to notice them rarely if at all. Outside of that context, I occasionally see it used for year ranges.
    • crazygringo 2y ago
      I think you're just not used to it. Quick, tell me how wide this range is, just as an order of magnitude: 285368737954–285368783645 Would be a lot easier if I only included the range at the end which had actually changed, wouldn't it? That's why it's clearer. Now obviously that was an extreme example, but it's also easier to see at a glance that 1,387–9 is just three pages, as opposed to 1,387–1,389.
      • handoflixue 2y ago
        If you format your numbers properly, you get "285,368,737,954–285,368,783,645" That's a change of about 50K, which isn't really that hard to notice. "285368737954-83645" is... well I have to assume somewhere in the 10-100K range? Hold on a second while I line up the digits again... uh... let me rewrite that to "37,954 - 83,645", okay now I can read it. No, that wasn't any easier. I kept getting lost tracking where in the first number I was leaving off. Much easier to compare 737 vs 783 - digit groupings are really useful! (I'll agree that 1387-9 is pretty reasonable, it just breaks down the longer the number is. Also, if the page count is important, you can just say "1387-1389 (3 pages)". This feels like the sort of shorthand you used to get on Twitter)