I’ve been on a numeracy crusade lately, particularly in the overuse of decimals — or what I call, getting "decimal happy." I’m not sure what got me on this kick, but I’ve realized that there’s a good reason all of us should be concerned about this.

I’m convinced that reporters who throw in a lot of decimals — and a lot of numbers for that matter — are doing it merely because they are uncomfortable working with numbers. They see numbers in a press release and feel as if they must recite them verbatim for fear of getting it wrong. They’d rather put in more numbers, just to be safe.

I’ve long subscribed to the Sarah Cohen theory of numbers: less is better. Her IRE beat book, "Numbers in the Newsroom" is my most treasured (and most dog-eared) book on my desk. It’s filled with lots of good advice and practical tips on what to do in certain situations.

I can open any issue of my newspaper and find at least a half dozen examples where one of Sarah’s rules has been broken. The most frequent offender, and easiest to spot, is the decimal-laden number.

As Sarah says in her book, each decimal slows down the reader and disrupts the flow of the story. Readers can absorb whole words without slowing down, but they read numbers much like a child would learn a word by sounding out each letter. I don’t think many reporters are aware of this fact.

The bigger issue, though, is whether using decimals is even accurate.

A simple example is this: Let’s say you are writing a story about foreclosures and you have a neighborhood with 101 homes in it. Thirty of them have been foreclosed upon. If you calculate the percentage, it comes out to 29.7%. But since you started with two whole numbers (30 and 101), your answer won’t be precise enough to warrant using decimals. So in this case, you’d round up to 30 percent.

The stories I find are the biggest offenders, though, are the ones that have findings from a survey (including Census data!). And here’s where less number-savvy reporters typically feel discomfort. They get the survey results in a press release and are afraid of misconstruing the results if they don’t recite the numbers exactly.

Here’s a very common example:

"The state still has one of the lowest uninsured rates in the nation, but the Minnesota Department of Health found the rate increased from 5.7 percent in 2001 to 7.4 percent in 2004. In that same period, employers offering health insurance dropped from 84.1 percent to 80.3 percent."

Basically what this is saying is that the percentage of people in Minnesota without health insurance increased slightly over a three-year period, while the number of employers offering insurance dropped slightly. Phrasing it like that is called "characterizing" the numbers.

I’ve told readers the same thing as the original graph, but I analyzed it for them. They didn’t have to do the math in their heads.

And if you did feel intent on using the numbers (which, by the way, are displayed in a graphic just a half inch below this paragraph in the newspaper!), is there really any difference between 5.7% and 6%? Definitely not in this case. This was based on a survey — meaning it’s an estimate, filled with plenty of uncertainty. Using the phrase "about 6 percent" is more than accurate enough in this case.

I can constantly remind reporters about not getting decimal happy, but the harder part is teaching them how to be comfortable characterizing numbers. How do we teach that? Sarah’s book talks about the importance of this, but doesn’t really give any concrete advice on how to improve your comfort level.

Is it just a matter of practice? (I think that’s what did the trick for me). Or are reporters simply not cognizant of the fact that they are uncomfortable? In that case, would it be possible to devise some kind of training? (perhaps rewriting sentences like I did above?) I don’t have a good answer for this just yet. So if you have one, I’d love to hear it.

Why is this important? Reporters won’t be comfortable moving into computer-assisted reporting if they aren’t even comfortable writing a story about survey results from a press release.

If they are uncomfortable writing about numbers that are essentially handed to them on a silver platter, they’re going to have a tough time first figuring out what analysis is needed of their raw data, and second, how to portray those results in a story. With CAR, there is no press release to fall back upon.