Q. Will you provide examples of what is considered “humanistic” versus “scientific or statistical” when addressing the use of the symbol % or the word percent?
A. In academe, the humanities include subjects like modern and classical languages, geography, linguistics, literature, history, law, philosophy, archaeology, religion, ethics, history, and criticism. Science and statistical fields include mathematics, engineering, statistics, computer science, biology, chemistry, accounting, medicine, and sociology. There are no strict lines. General writing in a technical field (such as a feature on astrophysics written for a popular magazine) might feature a nontechnical writing style. Any content that includes a lot of numbers and percentages is a good candidate for using the % symbol instead of writing percent over and over.