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I'm trying to perfect the following in a sentence that appears in a
brochure soon to go to press:
"thicknesses less than 0.001 inches (0.0254 millimeters)"
Since the measurement refers to a fraction/decimal less than one, do I
write "inch" (for one ten-thousandths of an inch) or "inches"??
My first instinct was "inches," and my biologist husband says that he
believes that is the convention in his field. But now I'm not sure.
The context is a brochure advertising the company's in-front-of-the crowd
ability to manufacture precisely tooled products for larger manufacturing
firms. The audience is mixed: everyone from the CEO to the engineers
will be reading this brochure.
I can't find the answer in The Chicago Manual of Style (14th Edition) or
in the St. Martin's Handbook of Technical Writing. Can you help me?
Please e-mail me personally if you find a definitive answer:
dwkahn -at- lamar -dot- colostate -dot- edu
TIA!
--Deb Kahn
(the vastly underemployed in Northern Colorado ;)
