Style manuals, professional societies, and journals specific to your field publish thorough guidelines about how to handle small matters of mechanics. For instance, Suggestions to Authors of the Reports of the United States Geological Survey [1] addresses such issues as whether to use the chemical name or symbol in writing; the American Meteorological Society’s Authors’ Guide [2] dictates how one should express time, time zone, day, month, and year in writing. Chase down such sources within your field for specifics on matters of mechanics.
Two especially noteworthy issues of mechanics that arise regularly in technical writing are how to handle temperature measurements and numbers. Some guidelines on these matters follow.
Degree measures of temperature are normally expressed with the ° symbol rather than by the written word, with a space after the number but not between the symbol and the temperature scale:
The sample was heated to 80 °C.
Unlike the abbreviations for Fahrenheit and Celsius, the abbreviation for Kelvin (which refers to an absolute scale of temperature) is not preceded by the degree symbol (i.e., 12 K is correct).
The rules for expressing numbers in technical writing are relatively simple and straightforward:
Following these rules, here are some examples of properly expressed numbers:
The depth to the water at the time of testing was 16.16 feet.
For this treatment, the steel was heated 18 different times.
Two dramatic changes followed: four samples exploded and thirteen lab technicians resigned.
Check out these handy resources related to expressing numbers and numerals in text:
"Using Numbers, Writing Lists" advice from Capital Community College website [4]