It`s just horrible and there`s no excuse for it. This is not recommended (or even tolerated) in any important style. Not even legal ones, like Bluebook or Redbook. Bryan Garner, the main motivator behind The Redbook, gives essentially the same advice he gives in Garner`s Modern English Usage for a more general audience: If you ask most lawyers why they do it this way, they don`t get an answer. The benefits of simply writing down the numbers are obvious. Only one number must be inserted or changed. It also takes up less space and makes a document less „legal”. A very experienced lawyer once told me that he preferred to write only the numbers, because if you both write the number with words and add the numbers, what do you do if they don`t match? Amounts in cents are treated in the same way as amounts in whole dollars. For example, a contract for the sale of a bicycle for $225.50 would read: „The buyer shall pay the seller the sum of two hundred and twenty-five dollars and fifty cents ($225.50).” Competent writing of this kind often requires reading a topic and this research brings me into contact with filings and judgments as well as many other legal documents. Legal drafting can be dry; It can be annoying.
In the worst case, this can be downright terrible: not only exaggerated and tormented, but also practically incomprehensible to an informed and interested reader. W D Adkins lives in Atlanta, Georgia and has been writing professionally since 2008. He writes about business, personal finance and careers. Adkins holds a master`s degree in history and sociology from Georgia State University. In 2009, he became a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. Note the hyphen (also known as the „minus sign”) in „thirty-four” above. Technically, numbers between 21 and 99 must be separated if they end in a number other than „0”. However, merchants don`t care about formatting rules when you write a check.
They just don`t want the cheque to bounce back. If you forget to add a hyphen or add one where you shouldn`t, they probably won`t notice or care. Posted on July 30, 2021 by thebettereditor. Legal drafting can be dry; It can be annoying. At worst, it can be downright horrific: not just exaggerated and tortured. Not much in professional writing really makes me angry, but this is one of them.* Some numbers **/must/**be clarified – especially financial, where a slipped decimal can have big consequences.* Why does the penny-in-glass candy cost 12 cents instead of 1 cent? Details are crucial in a legal document. If a document contains a dollar amount, such as an amount due for an invoice, the exact amount should be clear to each reader. For this purpose, dollars and cents are written in legal documents in words and numbers. This ensures that the right amount is understood, especially if it is a large and uneven amount. In general, I recommend using words for numbers up to ten and numbers after. (MSCD 10.4 mentions some obvious exceptions.) The Chicago Manual of Style 9.23 recommends that you use the same approach to specify the amounts of money you use for numbers in general. But for the purposes of contracts, I recommend that you indicate all sums of money only with numbers.
In a business context, it would be very strange to use words for nine dollars but numbers for 12 dollars. One of the bad things I rarely have to go through in legal writing is the completely unnecessary notation of numbers. Not many things about professional writing really make me angry, but this is one of them. On the other hand, good legal writing can be both interesting and entertaining (as Justice Posner and others have shown time and time again). I`m not talking about spelling „six” for „6” or even the occasional „twenty-five” for „25” (the former would be recommended by virtually any accepted style; the latter would be acceptable to a large minority). Oh no: I am talking about documents that give a year, such as 1997, or an amount in dollars, such as $3,150,621: one thousand, nine cents, ninety-seven; Three million, one hundred and fifty thousand, six hundred and twenty-one dollars (. superfluous commas and „and” added to emphasize the point). It is included here, along with most of the credentials removed. It is less a strictly legal document than a government document, but the idea is exactly the same: someone felt the need to state the large numbers used to describe a long series of measures of property boundaries, and the result is anathema. The Associated Press or AP Stylebook, used by American journalists and public relations professionals, is the English grammar guide against which all news writing is measured. While regular Joes may not have heard of the Stylebook AP – let alone open a problem when drafting a contract – it does contain a number of suggestions for writing issues that can be useful in this context.
Here are the important rules: When I think intensely about this point („placement only”), it seems to me that the problem resembles both the shared infinitive problem and the superstition that a preposition can never end a sentence. In many cases, these things are absolutely true for clear writing. In some cases, these are not necessarily problems, but they produce unpleasant writing. In other cases, they don`t matter. The „only” problem is real, but it is not a problem in all situations, so the solution should not be applied reflexively.