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Antonia Posted 21 years ago
Grammar

Beginning sentence with numbers

Hello!

Is it OK to start the sentence with the number? Can you help me avoid it?

Seventy to ninety per cent of sucess is usually ascribed/credited to this phase.

Thank you
  

Top answer

Hello Antonia Your sentence looks nice to me. You can start a sentence with a number if you write it in a word. It's not a grammar rule but a rule of writing styles.

  • Hello Antonia Your sentence looks nice to me.
  • You can start a sentence with a number if you write it in a word.
  • It's not a grammar rule but a rule of writing styles.
  • ( o ) Seventy to ninety per cent of sucess is usually ascribed/credited to this phase.
  • ( x ) 70 to 90 per cent of sucess is usually ascribed/credited to this phase.
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17 Answers
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Hello Antonia

Your sentence looks nice to me. You can start a sentence with a number if you write it in a word. It's not a grammar rule but a rule of writing styles.
(o) Seventy to ninety per cent of sucess is usually ascribed/credited to this phase.
(x) 70 to 90 per cent of sucess is usually ascribed/credi
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Thank you Paco, I wasn't sure whether this was an appropriate place to put my post on.
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And write them out at the end of a sentence, too.

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And make sure you correct your sentence to:

Seventy to ninety percent success is usually ascribed/credited to this phase.
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I think you mean 'too', davkett. Emotion: wink
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Hello Davkett

I don't think Google is a final judge for English correctness. But 'ninety percent of success' hits 1140 pages whereas 'ninety percent success' does 560 pages. Do you think 'seventy to ninety percent of success' is so wrong? I have used "X percent of something" for decades, but no editors have complained about it.
paco
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'Too' would have been correct with that colon, but I really had this meaning in mind: 'make sure you change your sentence to this:'

So, in relation to my intention, forgetting the word 'this' made the sentence wrong for a punctuation reason.
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Paco,

I 'shot from the hip' on eliminating 'of' from 'percent of success'. It sounds wrong to me; that's all I can say. The other corrections are less debatable: 'percent', not 'per cent', and 'success', not 'sucess'.
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I'm with Paco on this one - I prefer "Seventy to ninety percent of success," although depending on the context I might like "Seventy to ninety percent of successes" even better. It's hard to tell if we're talking about success in general or individual examples of success.
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I didn't notice the misspelling 'sucess' in the original question. As for 'per cent', it's a British version of 'percent'. By the way, what does 'shot from the hip' mean? It's a phrase new to me.

paco

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