Grammar 101 with Michael Kwan

When you’re filling out a passport application, a courier waybill or any number of other documents, there’s a good chance that you have to enter the date. Even when you were handing in your elementary school assignments, there was a line near the top of the page where you were told to enter today’s date. With some of these, the format doesn’t really matter. In more formal contexts or in the case of data entry, however, the actual style or format that you use for the date can be incredibly important.

Today’s Grammar 101 post isn’t going to be about how you should write out the date in a numerical fashion. Some people will tell you that it has to be MM/DD/YY, others will say you should use DD.MM.YY and others still may prefer YYYY-MM-DD. Depending on the context, all of these could be perfectly appropriate. However, just as there are significant differences between Canadian and American spelling for many words (in addition to the broad range of regional slang), there are also differences in how we choose to write the date.

In the United States (and mostly, by extension, into Canada too), the formal way to write out a date is month day, year. For example, you could say that today’s post was published on September 25, 2014. It’s important to note that the day is simply a number (25) and not an ordinal (25th). Also, formal writing will always call for you to write out the month in its entirety, rather than shortening “September” to “Sep” or “Sept.” Formal documents will typically require the year be included every time as well, as this can minimize ambiguity should an excerpt be taken out of context.

If you were to look at even more formal documents and certificates, like a college diploma, you may find that the number representing the day is also written out in its entirety. The year could be too.

September the Twenty-Fifth, Two Thousand and Fourteen

Alternatively, the month and day can be swapped in formal settings:

The Twenty-Fifth of September, Two Thousand and Fourteen

This second formation is a tradition carried over from Europe and other parts of the world where the convention is more commonly to put the day ahead of the month. Hence, you get the day month year structure. If you were to pick up a newspaper in many other parts of the world, you wouldn’t see today’s date written as September 25, 2014. You’d see it as 25 September 2014. You’ll note that with this date format, the comma is absent between the month and the year.

In practice, I find myself using a combination of all of these. If I’m writing a blog post or article, I’ll use “September 25, 2014.” If I’m filling out a form and want to avoid ambiguity, I might use “25 Sept 2014.” And the file and folder naming convention I use on my computer is usually “2014-09-25.”

What about you? What style or structure do you prefer when writing out the date?