Sir, – There seems to be an ever-increasing tendency for The Irish Times to regard its readership as not being in any way numerate. I refer to an apparent aversion to display statistics in tabular form. Rather than display a table of data, the preference seems to be for the author of an article to interpret the data values in words, frequently giving ambiguous percentages along the way, and this makes it impossible for the reader to see quickly patterns and trends. This certainly fills column inches in the paper but I think unnecessarily so. – Yours, etc,
JOHN GAUGHAN,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.