I've been going through the new statutes which have been passed by the General Assembly so that I can brief our local law enforcement on them and present them at at local CLE (when you are in deepest darkest Far Southwest Virginia you do your own CLE's or you drive 6-10 hours east to get your hours). I've noticed some stylistic trends which which the General Assembly has become obsessed with. In particular, every time the General Assembly amends or alters a statute whatever gnomes are in charge of typing the new statute up are going through the statutes and changing any place a number is written out to plain numbers (ie. 35 instead of thirty five).   Apparently the accepted wisdom has changed from a written number being preferable to the numerical symbol being preferable.  Who knows why the accepted wisdom changed? I figure that some senior statute writing gnome has a reason, but the reality is that someone probably preferred numbers and came up with an excuse. It doesn't matter to me either way; both work and if it makes life more satisfying to the statute writing gnomes the General Assembly keeps working in the dungeons of the capital building, more power to them. In fact, I've been impressed by the patience which has been shown. They've not attempted to change all the statutes at once, they've been satisfied with making the stylistic changes as the opportunity presented itself.