This article explores how public writers view rhetorical decisions in their use of quantitative information to educate, inform, and move audiences toward action. Using the concept of “statistical framing” to describe how writers signal evaluations of numbers to their readers, we set out to learn how these writers connected their rhetorical goals to how they framed quantitative information. We interviewed 14 writers using the discourse-based interview method and found that, for various reasons, writers valued speeding up and slowing down evaluations of numbers.

Ida B. Wells uses what critical race theorists call counterstory to expose contradictions in majoritarian assumptions about race in her statistical rhetoric. By using rhetorically forceful characteristics of the African American Verbal Tradition in counterstories about the victims of lynching, Wells leverages embodiment and emotion to amplify statistics of lynching. This essay examines the rhetorical properties of different versions of statistics of Black victims of lynchings from 1883 to 1891 that Wells used in the early 1890s to show how Wells’s approach to amplification in quantitative rhetoric honors and advocates for the people that can make up a statistic.