Analysis on number use

The article that I chose to analyze for this week is an article found in the Minnesota Daily on the decreasing number of the sexually transmitted disease in Minnesota for the year 2009.

The reporters uses uses many different numbers to express years, the amount of sexually transmitted disease in the state of Minnesota, also the number of HIV cases that were reported in Minnesota, and also percentages.  Also, the title of the article has numbers in it, a 5, to express that STD rates have gone down in percentage.  The reporters then goes on to use exact numbers for the number of STD's reported in 2008 and in 2009.  I believe can be somewhat overwhelming because the both numbers are in the 10,000 range.  Therefore people overlook the exact numbers and continue to read the article without grasping the actual numbers, I did this myself during my first morning class.  I think it would more reader friendly if the sentence read "...just over 14,000 cases, up slightly from 2008," instead of "...with 14,186 cases, up slightly from 2008."

The reporters did use math to crunch some of the data down, such as using percentages like 70 percent to explain how much chlamydia cases reported had gone down.  I also believe that this helps the reader grasp the data better, especially when they are reading the first few paragraphs of the article, which appeared on the front page of the Minnesota Daily.

The source for the data used in the article comes from the Minnesota Department of Health.  There is also quotes and other information from Peter Carr, the manager of the STD and HIV section MDH.  There is also information from the Boynton College Student Health Survey, which is a health organization made available to students at the University of Minnesota.