Writing for an International Audience: Measurement Converter Tools
Miles and kilometres, metres and yards, Celsius and Fahrenheit, ounces and grams, litres and gallons; don’t we all get lost at times? Your readers might get as easily lost in your article when it contains measurements they don’t understand; and they might never come back. Use some tools to convert your measurements.
When writing for an international audience of readers, we all stumble over measurements. If we use metres we tend to lose readers used to yards and feet; if we go for miles, we lose those used to the kilometre. And if you are a recipe buff and love cooking, you might have noticed that the UK teaspoon is not equal to the US teaspoon.
Readers will not take the time to convert all the measurements you use in your article to one they understand. For them, your articles will fall off their radar and you’ll lose them for good. And cooks browsing your recipes won’t bother to check of you live in the US or the UK, and blame you for recipes gone wrong, again to your loss.
To get me out of that fix, I usually convert my measurements putting the converted value into brackets. For an example, see my article on the Bernina Pass in Switzerland. To do this in a speedy fashion, I found a website to convert just about anything from the useful to the rather weird. And when browsing, there are some really specialized conversions which are completely useless to me, but might be just up your lane.
The homepage to head for is called CSGNetwork. On the entry page you’ll find three options to choose from, Calculators and Converters, Award Winning Glossary, and Free Source Code Snippets. Once through to the calculators and converters, you’ll find menu options to take you to the specific theme page (like Everyday Use or Geography Related) which in turn open the menu of offered calculators or converters. Don’t waste time with trying to figure out which theme is the right one for you, if it seems near enough, go for it, as the calculators are multiple listed in any theme page where they make sense.
For those of you who are too lazy to search for the most common converters (I myself always belong to that group of readers), I’ve got a little list with the most common converters:
· Distances, Area, Mass & Weight, Liquids, Temperature all in one
· Altitude
These are just a few of the useful conversions found on the site. If you have more specialized needs, you’ll have to browse the site.
For those, like me, who are always get distracted by the weird and wacky, there is a load of information to be had, too. I found a Lunar Calendar, an Easter Calculator, Lunar and Sun Eclipse calculators, several Julian and Gregorian Date converters, and many, many more. Go have some fun, and use them.
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Tags: Celsius, distance, Fahrenheit, feet, gallons, kilometres, knots, liquids, litres, measurements, metres, miles, ounces, temperature, yards
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December 9th, 2010 at 4:59 am
Sometimes when I’m writing recipes I think about this. I always think readers should make use of the opportunity to learn how to do the conversions. It will only help them in the long run.