> spans pages 128–34.
Who omits the 1 from the second number?! That is aweful!
replies(3):
Who omits the 1 from the second number?! That is aweful!
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.
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?
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.
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)
Or, sure, sometimes you get "285,368,737,954–285,368,783,645". But it's not like that's some kind of default. Except if you suffer from defaultism --- typically prefixed by "American".