Clarity in little things: What was the date again?
Using numbers to express dates is a common practice, so you don’t have to worry about people being confused when you write something like “Our annual meeting will be held on 5/6/2008.” Right? Everyone knows that bit of shorthand translates to May 6th, right?
Not so fast. If you show that date—5/6/2008—to someone from Europe, and they might tell you that it means June 5th, not March 6th. Where the American convention is Month/Day/Year (MM/DD/YYYY), the European convention is that the day comes first, followed by the month, and then the year. (They frequently do the same even when spelling out the months; today’s date would be expressed as 6 March, 2008.)
So if you can, write dates using the names of the months. If you use a numeric format, explain which one you’re using, MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY.
Roy Jacobsen
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Reader Comments (4)
Not so fast. If you show that date—5/6/2008—to someone from Europe, and they might tell you that it means June 5th, not March 6th.
I think you mean May 6th, not March 6th.
Also, I've found that YYYY/MM/DD is the least ambiguous date format. If the year is first, I don't think anyone would think that the next number would be the day, as sequentially that doesn't make sense.
The other advantage to YYYY/MM/DD is that it alphabetizes well. If you have a bunch of files, for example, with the same name but different date suffix (i.e. cv20070912 and cv20080304.doc), they will be ordered chronologically if sorted by name. If you use MMDDYYYY, then you'll have, for example, a March 3rd file of 2006 (03032006) next to the March 17th file of 2007 (03172007), whereas an April 2006 file (04072006) would be after it. That doesn't make much sense.
Much as I hate to side with Europeans, I feel I have to note that their system makes a whole lot more sense than ours, since it runs logically from smaller to larger.
Even domestically this can be a problem. In the Marine Corps, this comment is being written on 080603. I agree that writing the date out is the most elegant and efficient solution. I believe Strunk and White (1972 ed.) suggests day month year, 6 March 2008, without a comma before the year. But, I may be incorrect on the comma issue.
I love 12Mar08 - short, simple, impossible to misunderstand.