: Units to use in travelogue-book (time, weight, temperature, distance, etc) I'm writing a book (travelogue) about Japan in English, detailing my walk across the country a few years ago. My target

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The simple solution is to use in writing whatever units are most appropriate at that specific spot in the text (probably with a heavy overweight toward the units the reader will be accustomed to, so imperial units if you are targetting a US audience), but to include a conversion table right at the beginning or end of the book. (Literally; it being on the first or last page makes it easy to flip to it, check something, and flip back to wherever you were reading.)

Such a conversion table could give a formula for doing exact conversions (for example, °C = (°F - 32) ÷ 1.8 ≅ (°F - 30) ÷ 2, km = mi × 1.602 ≅ mi × 1.5 which gives both the exact conversion as well as an approximation), as well as include enough readily converted numbers that the reader can get close enough just looking briefly at a table (100 km ≅ 62.5 mi, 20 °C = 68 °F, ...).

Don't go overboard with this, but by including enough details to give the reader a headstart in doing a mental conversion, it becomes a lot less critical which units you use in the prose. If you say that some place is 250 km from another, and there is a table that says that 100 km is approximately 62.5 miles, it doesn't take that much mental arithmetic to determine that the distance is approximately 2 × 62.5 + 62.5 ÷ 2 ≅ 125 + 31 or 155 miles. By making a table for, say, 10, 25, 50, 75, 100, 250 and 1000 km and miles respectively, going back and forth for most distances up to about 2000 km or miles becomes quite easy. For example, if you have values for 250 and 1000 km in miles and want to know the number of miles for 700 km, you get quite close by taking 625 miles (1000 km) minus 155 miles (250 km), for 450 miles (while 700 km is actually 437 miles, an error of 3%).

If you include temperature (°F to °C and back), distance (mi to km and back), fuel consumption (mpg to L/100 km and back), speed (mph to km/h and back) and time (12-hour to 24-hour and back), each at reasonable granularity, you should have most bases covered.

For travel guides, you rarely need more accurate figures that what are easily doable with a small helper table and some quick mental arithmetic.

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You state that you are trying to write in American English, so the units of measurements and conventions that you use should be those familiar to speakers of American English.

A rather more important question is Why are you trying to write in American English? If you believe that there is a market in the USA for a travelogue comparing life in Japan with that in Sweden then press on. On the other hand, the accessibility of your descriptions of quantities might be the least of your worries.

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I've never written a travelogue, but of the few I've read, it depends on your intention. As one of your American readers trying to retrace your steps or find specific landmarks you mention, I would prefer US units -- unless I'm traveling by car with instruments in local units. If you are more interested in capturing the experience and sense of place, I would prefer local units. I would recommend against compromising with qualifiers, parentheticals, etc. Choose one and stick with it. If you have just a ton of usages, maybe include an appendix with a conversion chart.

Ultimately, though, this is the sort of decision your publisher or editor gets final say on. So whatever you decide, if this is an unsolicited manuscript, it might not matter since your editor/publisher might ask you to change all the units anyway.

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