Writing and Grammar - Dates

As an editor, I am able to see many common mistakes that people tend to make consistently in their writing. Conversational style is great in the tone of the piece, and sometimes grammar does indeed take a back seat to impact and imagery. However, there are certain common errors that are made in writing that do not change impact or imagery and are simply grammar and editing errors. Let’s look at one of the most common writing mistakes made.

DATES

One of the most common mistakes I see in editing appears to be a little known rule about how to properly punctuate and use dates in writing, especially denoting a year. Unfortunately, this is such a common mistake that most people aren’t even aware that it is not grammatically correct when they see the error. I’ve even seen these errors in headlines of major newspapers and magazine, and this error proliferates the internet.

When you are writing and have the need to include a date, proper format for writing out the complete date is as follows:

Example:October 31, 2006

Now, this is usually written properly, but what happens when you want to include the day of the week?

Example: Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Then there is the special circumstance where you might want to write the date like this:

Friday the 13th, October 2006

Note that there is no comma before the year when the month immediately precedes it.

But these are mostly used correctly, and are included here only for reference. The one that bothers me the most about dates is the use of the year, abbreviated, and how that is often punctuated incorrectly.

For example, we often refer to decades by only the last two digits of the year, right? The decade that is 1980-1989 is often referred to as The ‘80s.

Now, note how I wrote – ‘80s

An apostrophe is used for two things in writing –

1) a contraction, meaning that something was removed or left out, and the apostrophe takes the place of the missing item. In the word don’t the contraction is short for DO NOT and the apostrophe takes the place of the O in the word NOT