In a READ or WRITE statement we can give the format explicitly as an argument, or we can indicate a label where a FORMAT statement resides.
For example, the statement
write(unit=6,fmt=''('Areas = ',3(F7.3,2X))'') a1, a2, a3
can be written, equivalently, as
write(unit=6,fmt=''(a,3(F7.3,2x))'') a1, a2, a3 10 format( 'areas = ',3(F7.3,2x) )