One of my favorite writers, Derek Thompson, of the Atlantic, does a superb job of bringing clarity to a statistic that most readers would otherwise skip right over. Here’s Derek:
“In June, researchers from N.Y.U., Stanford, and Microsoft published a paper with a title that made their position on the matter unambiguous: ‘Digital Addiction.’ In closing, they reported that ‘self-control problems cause 31% of social media use.’ Think about that: About one in three minutes spent on social media is time we neither hoped to use beforehand nor feel good about in retrospect.”
There’s a lot to like here:
1. The transition, “Think about that.” (Most of us would use a cliché such as “in others words.”)
2. The conversion of a percentage (31%) into a fraction (one in three). (This is one of the tips I teach in my workshop on humanizing big numbers.)
3. The vivid and concrete translation from “self-control problems” to “time we neither hoped to use beforehand nor feel good about in retrospect.”
Finally, Derek packed all these tricks into a single sentence. Well-done!
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