How do I write numbers in dialogue?
My proofreader recently revealed to me the following, which I was wholly unaware of:
...when a number/code/serial or whatever is said in dialogue, you write the whole thing out...
I had written the designation of a robot as Unit M55/987.3, and he said I would need to sound it out:
...“Unit Em-fifty-five slash nine hundred eighty-seven-point-three has been terminated.”...
Is this true? If it is true, can I still 'ignore' it as one of those grammatical liberties authors sometimes take (in the same class as using fragments)?
2 answers
In fiction, there's no rule for this, only differing styles and opinions. However, some editors seem to like using the Chicago Manual of Style's alternative rule for this.
9.3 An alternative rule--zero through nine. Many publications, including those in scientific or journalistic contexts, follow the simple rule of spelling out only single-digit numbers and using numerals for all others [...]
It goes on to reference the exceptions to this. (9.3 is an alternative to the more strict rule 9.2 that requires spelling out all numerals from zero through one hundred.)
Exceptions to these include spelling out round numbers. For example: "seven hundred", "one thousand", "forty-seven thousand", etc. There are also other rules for money, ordinal numbers, decimals, percentages, etc, but these are overkill for fiction.
The number you indicate in your question is more like a serial number. I can't find anything for that, but personally I'd use the abbreviated rule for numerals in general, using numerals and letters and not spelling them out. Unless the character's name were something short like the robots in Star Wars, where (for example) R2-D2 becomes "Artoo" for short.
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Arguably, one could say that the pronunciation of such a string is ambiguous. Would someone say it "em five five slash nine eight seven dot three" or "em fifty-five nine eighty-seven point three" or other possible variations. If the "M" stands for something, do they say the word or just the letter "M"? Etc. If it matters in the story, then you need to spell it out. Like if there's a scene where someone is saying the serial number but doesn't get a chance to finish before the transmission line is cut or whatever, and then the person hearing says "well, it's a nine-hundred series, that at least narrows it down", but if he said "nine eight ..." rather than "nine hundred eighty ...", how does the hearer know that the number had three digits and not 2 or 4? Or if the "M" stands for, I don't know, "Mercury", and you just give it as "M55" and the reader says it in his head as "em five five", and then later a character who is unfamiliar with these serial numbers asks, "Is that related to the planet Mercury, the element, or the Greek god?" the reader may wonder, Wait, how did he know that "M" stands for "Mercury". And then maybe he'll say, Oh, I've been reading it wrong, George must have been saying "Mercury five five", not "em five five". Etc. That is, you don't want to leave a pronunciation ambiguous, let the reader pick one plausible pronunciation in his head, and then three chapters later say something that indicates that he's been reading it wrong all this time, and now he has to re-interpret scenes he's already read.
But if none of that matters, if it's just an identifier, and whether the reader says it in his head one way or the other makes no difference at all, then I'd think giving it in a short form is better, because it's more compact. If the reader says it in his head differently than you were thinking when you were writing it, but it doesn't matter, so what?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/16721. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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