AP Writing Style Numbers and Objectivity

Numerals: The general rule is: Spell out one through nine, and use figures for 10 or more. Exceptions to the rule abound. For instance:

Always use figures for dimensions, ages, years, percentages and dates, except when such figures begin a sentence (see below).
Also, spell out numbers that begin a sentence (unless the number is a year, like 1998.)
Also, remember that the "spell out one through nine" rule applies to ordinal numbers, too. In other words, you should spell out first through ninth, and use figures for 10th or more.
See "numerals" in AP Style for details.

In broadcast writing, spell out one through twelve and use figures for 13 to 999. For numbers above 999, spell out "hundred," "thousand," million," "billion" and so forth, and use a hyphen to combine these terms with numerals: one thousand (for 1,000), 15-hundred (for 1,500), 18-thousand (for 18,000), 10-million (for 10,000,000), etc. See also: dollars. (Back to top)
Objectivity: "Objective" means "based on independently verifiable fact." You can objectively say, for example, that a rose is red, mainly because anyone else who looks at the rose would also conclude that the rose is red. Anyone who looked at the rose and saw some other color would be considered color blind at best. If you say, though, that the rose is pretty, you're no longer being objective about the matter, because what's pretty to one person may not be pretty to someone else. To a rose lover, a rose is pretty. To an orchid lover, a rose is plain. Similarly, it may seem entirely appropriate to characterize, say, someone's death as "unfortunate" or even "tragic." But suppose that, unknown to you, the person who died was, well, a real schmuck. All the people the person cheated, stole from, abused, humiliated, exploited, and so on probably don't see his death as unfortunate or tragic. So it's really best simply to describe what happened and let readers make their own value judgments.

News stories do, of course, include opinionated statements quite often. But they are nearly always the opinions of someone other than the journalist. A journalist may write, for example, that, "Lawmakers have a moral duty to ensure that every child can see a doctor when he or she is sick, Sen. John Smith, sponsor of a bill to guarantee health care coverage for all children in the state, said." But it's Sen. Smith's opinion, not the journalist's opinion.

Finally, it's important to realize that although journalists try to be as objective as as possible, no journalist can be completely objective. The very act of defining a set of events as "newsworthy" and boiling those events down into a news story involves making all kinds of non-objective decisions based on value judgments and personal perspectives. But journalists try to be objective where possible by emphasizing independently verifiable facts and avoiding overt, unattributed statements of opinions or judgments. Overt statements of opinion usually are reserved for editorials or opinion columns that are run exclusively on a special page or pages inside the paper. (Back to top)