After reading Making Data Meaningful, Part 1, A guide to writing stories about numbers, I'm considering making it a prerequisite for all my technical writing classes. Nearly everything it says agrees with what I teach, and there's even more information than I can cover in class (or in this brief review).

• Tell a story with your statistics; don't just tell the statistic to your reader.
• Write like a journalist: Tell the reader your point in your lead.
• Start paragraphs with a theme (topic) sentence that contains no numbers.
• Use language appropriate for your reader.
• Write compelling headlines.
• Use clear graphics and analytical headings.
• Communicate more with words than numbers (like journalists do).

1. The text is fully justified, which forces strange spaces into each line. If you've taken one of my classes, you might remember seeing slide pictures of the result of full justification (great big "holes" across the line of text).
2. There's a nice half-page meant to help management encourage good writing, but it's plunked down in the middle of the book with no transition to the other parts of the book. I wonder why it wasn't in the conclusion.
   

But those are minor details, given the value of this short book. I read it in about an hour, underlining and all. You can download it free here. Consider reading the second guide too, which provides guidelines and examples of effective tables, charts, and maps and using other forms of visualization to make data meaningful. It also offers advice on how to avoid bad or misleading visual presentations.