editorial advice please

I see that 3.3 USAnians visited France last year, but I'm having trouble finding the number of Brits who did.

textibule, a "known unknown" isn't a safe bet. It's something that you know you don't know. The number of Brits who visited France last year is for me a known unknown.

For a friend of mine, the fact that a pangolin walks on its hind legs was an unknown unknown until the other day. She had never heard of pangolins, so she didn't know that she didn't how their manner of locomotion.

3.3 USAnians? Was that two guys and a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy?

3.3 million, compared to almost 9 million Brits, apparently.

Thanks.

In 2011, there were 12,378,000 "Tourist arrivals" from residents of the UK. There were also 4,737,000 day trips made from the UK (i.e. no overnight stay). There were 3,325,000 arrivals from US residents. There were also over a million day trips. I can't imagine doing a genuine day trip from the US, so my guess would be most were long layovers where someone cleared immigration & spent a few hours in Paris or something.

83% of 2012 visitors were from Europe. There were 1.4 Chinese visitors in 2012.

(from an English publication of the French tourism directorate and news reports of the 2012 edition).

A day trip by a US resident need not be a day trip from the US. It could be a day trip from Britain or Germany or Belgium etc.

Vinny,

With all due respect, from where I sit in the SW of France, there are zillions of Brits who live here or pass through regularly. There are (just) a handful of Americans living here (myself included), and the occasional today-is-tuesday-this-must-be-France tourist coming through rapidly on the way to somewhere else. It's just not the same demographic, believe me.

Use a little bit of each, randomly and annoy as many people as possible.

One day us dyslexics will rule the world.

Another vote for British English. Though I like zashibis's suggestion to add conversions into imperial units where it makes sense. "3000m (about 10,000 ft)," etc.

The impression I get on this forum and others is that the British still use imperial measures quite a bit, e.g. when giving driving distances or their height and weight It may be because the forums I read atract an older crowd.

I still vote for using metric though.

Vinny #24, that's not quite right. Inside the Schengen zone, which includes Germany and Belgium (but not Britain), there are no border controls at all. So an American citizen visiting France for a day from Germany or Belgium wouldn't be noticed (or counted).