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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/16721
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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?

Original score: 3