STATISTICS.  To make statistical facts comprehensible and interesting is usually a difficult problem for the inexperienced writer.  Masses of figures generally mean very little to the average reader.  Unless the significance of statistics can be quickly grasped, they are almost valueless as a means of explanation.  One method of simplifying them is to translate them into terms with which the average reader is familiar.  This may often be done by reducing large figures to smaller ones.  Instead of saying, for example, that a press prints 36,000 newspapers an hour, we may say that it prints 10 papers a second, or 600 a minute.  To most persons 36,000 papers an hour means little more than a large number, but 10 papers and one second are figures sufficiently small to be understood at a glance.  Statistics sometimes appear less formidable if they are incorporated in an interview or in a conversation.

In undertaking to explain the advantages of a cooeperative community store, a writer was confronted with the problem of handling a considerable number of figures.  The first excerpt below shows how he managed to distribute them through several paragraphs, thus avoiding any awkward massing of figures.  In order to present a number of comparative prices, he used the concrete case, given below, of an investigator making a series of purchases at the store.

    (1)

Here’s the way the manager of the community store started.  He demonstrated to his neighbors by actual figures that they were paying anywhere from $2 to $8 a week more for their groceries and supplies than they needed to.  This represented the middlemen’s profits.

He then proposed that if a hundred families would pay him regularly 50 cents a week, he would undertake to supply them with garden truck, provisions and meats at wholesale prices.  To clinch the demonstration he showed that an average family would save this 50-cent weekly fee in a few days’ purchases.

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There is no difference in appearance between the community store and any other provision store.  There is no difference in the way you buy your food.  The only difference is that you pay 50 cents a week on a certain day each week and buy food anywhere from 15 to 40 per cent less than at the commercial, non-cooeperative retail stores.

    (2)

The other day an investigator from the department of agriculture went to the Washington community store to make an experiment.  He paid his 50-cent weekly membership fee and made some purchases.  He bought a 10-cent carton of oatmeal for 8 cents; a 10-cent loaf of bread for 8 cents; one-half peck of string beans for 20 cents, instead of for 30 cents, the price in the non-cooeperative stores; three pounds of veal for 58 cents instead of 80 cents; a half dozen oranges for 13 cents instead of the usual price of from 20 to 25 cents.