How to Write About Ranges. Tip #2:
Only a handful of school districts within a 30-40 mile radius rank among the top twenty-five school districts.
The solution for this example is not simply to replace the hyphen with a dash; the range must be recast as shown here: “Only a handful of school districts within a 30- to 40-mile radius rank among the top twenty-five school districts.” The expressed range is not “30–40”; it is “a 30-mile radius to 40-mile radius,” with the first value truncated to the number and a suspensive hyphenation. (This range can also be expressed “a radius of 30 to 40 miles.”)
Qualifying businesses are those with revenues of $10–$20 billion.
This sentence suggests that the low end of the range is $10, rather than $10 billion. Except in the case of suspensive hyphenation, values should be fully expressed: “Qualifying businesses are those with revenues of $10 billion–$20 billion.”
