Writing Dates Clearly: Some Formats

Greetings again. I hope you’re having a good September.

Many in the AuthorAID community are observing holidays this month. This year, the Muslim festival Eid al-Fitr fell in September. So did the Jewish holy days Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Also, Mid-Autumn Festival occurs in a few days. In keeping with Chinese custom, during this holiday I’ll look at the moon and think of faraway friends—including AuthorAID friends around the world.

The dates of these holidays are determined by different lunar calendars. Even when using the same solar calendar, those of us in different countries sometimes have trouble communicating about dates.

Why the problem? Different parts of the world use different formats for dates. For example, in some places 9/5 means September 5. In others it means May 9.

To avoid confusion, it’s often best to write out the name of the month when communicating internationally. If the year is included, one convenient format (in part because there’s no comma) is day, then month, then year—for example, 5 September 2010.

This week in an e-mail discussion list, I read some messages about the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) format for dates. This format is YYYY-MM-DD (for example, 2010-09-05 for 5 September 2010).  

The ISO format is good for naming computer files so they appear in order by date. I use it to label the Word files for my blog posts (Blog Draft 2010-09-09, Blog Draft 2010-09-18, etc). Perhaps some of you use this format for such purposes.

Wishing you a good week— Barbara