This rather glorious interview with Francis Ford Coppola about, oh, everything and anything anyone should care about does, alas, exemplify a point to which more publications should divert attention.
I can't rail about such an incursion in such charming company as Mr. Coppola, but I will show you this excerpt:
"The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do. But unfortunately, after 15-20 years, it became a commercial industry."
Briefly, publications have sensible standards about the way they present numbers. Fine. I posit that among those standards should always be an exclusion for numbers in quoted speech.
Why? Not just because I'm a sneering grammarian, but because it's impossible to say 15-20. What is there is "fifteen dash twenty." We say "fifteen to twenty" only because we infer the "to" from the dash.
People don't speak in text-convenient abbreviations, they speak in words. Like "fifteen" and "to". Perhaps Coppola actually said "fifteen or twenty". Perhaps he said "fifteen, twenty". Who knows? Even if he said "fifteen to twenty", it's kind of, well, irrelevant. The point is that, regrettably, his personal expression has been reduced in this case to a typesetting convention.
Written text should take its cues from spoken language (especially in speech), not the other way around.
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