A common standard for reporting results in astrophysics (and likely much of science) is flawed. When reporting a distribution we often assume it is distributed as a Gaussian and report the position of the 16th, 50th and 84th percentile of the data. This is a useful _summary statistic_ - it tells us concrete information about the general form of the distribution. However, it can be misleading if read as a _result_ - something that gives a representative reporting of the distribution. If a distribution is asymmetric then the three stated percentiles have no direct relevance to the data, and it is not possible to recreate an approximation to the distribution from them. This is of particular concern when one author quotes _results_ from another (particularly if they are actually repurposing _summary statistics_) to use for meta-data analysis or as priors for their own work. Asymmetric extensions of the Gaussian normal exist, but are rarely used, because their parameters need to be estimated via costly methods (whilst computing the mean or the median is a direct and efficient calculation). In this paper I show a method for calculating the 3 parameters that define the _split normal_ directly and robustly. I suggest that this could become the new minimal standard for _pragmatic_ result reporting - encoding a more representative approximate distribution without any extra overhead and allowing authors to be more definite in separating _summary statistics_ and the reporting of usable _results_.