How to reference dates like a historian

When using dates in your writing, it can be difficult to know how specific you should be. Should you include the day, the month, or just the year? Alternatively, should you write “early 1950s” or “1952”?

As an academic editor with a PhD in history, many of my clients are historians or in history-adjacent fields.

It is essential that these authors know how to guide the reader through the chronology of a narrative. But they also don’t want to bog the reader down with unnecessary information!

One way to know how precise you should be with your dates is to identify the date range of your entire piece. Are you covering a 75-year period? If so, you’re likely going to be focused more on years and decades—with the occasional deep dive into months and days when discussing a specific anecdote. However, if your manuscript covers only a 10-year period, you’re going to be more focused on months and years—and sometimes even days.

I recently had a client come to me with a history manuscript covering a short period of time, less than five years. After reading the piece, I still did not have a clear idea of when events unfolded or when they unfolded in relation to each other in time. And I realized that this was because the client was using time posts more appropriate for a longer time span.

For example, they described the uprising of enslaved Africans against the Cherokee Nation “in late 1842,” a date that really should have been written as November 1842 or even November 15, 1842.* In my feedback, I encouraged the author to be more precise about when events occurred. Knowing the month, for example, would allow the reader to situate the event in time and understand it as oh so close to other events highlighted by the author.

In this case, the <5-year chronology of the piece offers information about how to write about time. By including specific months (and even days) in their descriptions, the author will help the reader see the events’ temporary relationships, including how people of the early 1840s experienced often-concurrent moments. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean the author needs to inundate the reader with the day/month/year to show relationships across time. Another way to bring the reader along the temporal journey is to use phrases like: Xyz event occurred "just two months after" the rebellion of enslaved Africans. With this phrasing, the author can show a temporal relationship without introducing another date for the reader to remember.

Being aware of the date range of your manuscript will help you identify how to reference dates and guide the reader through the chronology of your piece. Using this strategy to zoom out or zoom in with your descriptions may also give you, the author, new insight into your work!

*Details changed to protect author privacy.

We cannot compartmentalize our way through fascism

“You just have to compartmentalize,” said a faculty member to my client, an international graduate student from the Global South. The student had asked their advisor if she had any advice on how to write a dissertation in the midst of growing f@scism in the US and the government’s increasing revocations of student visas.

While the suggestion to compartmentalize might resonate with some people, my client experienced it as a thoughtless and empty recommendation. In the face of looming threats to them and their family, they find it impossible to compartmentalize.

“To separate into isolated compartments or categories” is how Merriam-Webster defines the word, evoking the image of a bento box with dividers isolating rice from dumplings from green beans.

But the worries my client has about their safety cannot be teased from the creative labor of knowledge production, cannot be cleaved in two and stored in their refrigerator.

Of course, there is no easy answer to my client’s question.

Perhaps the only response is to recognize that no answer is adequate for the current moment.

As Angela Cox, PhD, wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, “You do not have to have the answers. You do not have to offer solutions. You can just be there in the moment with another's pain and see them.”

And this is exactly what my client and I did—sat together on Zoom in mutual recognition of the horror of the moment and inequitable impact of state policies on Black and Brown international students.

Then, we brainstormed together how I could support them to write while they are concurrently feeling so much grief. Because, yes--their dissertation is emerging out of their grief, not from a separate compartment in their body-mind. 💜

Escape turgid prose with these sentence-level life preservers

Engaging academic prose ensnares us and leaves us wanting more.

And it’s never too late to learn how to transform tired prose into a captivating narrative—no matter the subject. 

One way to draft a compelling knowledge product is to drill down to the sentence level!

This suggestion is informed by Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing, a now-classic guide to good writing across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. 

In her research, Sword discovered that stylish academic writers rely on some common principles to craft their sentences. I introduce three of these principles below.

**

Principle #1

Use concrete nouns (lesbians, lawmakers, citizens) instead of nominalizations (carelessness, performance, reduction). Sword refers to nominalizations, nouns created from adjectives or verbs, as zombie nouns. 

Spotlight example (history): “In the late-eighteenth century, “[p]hysical anthropologists reduced the question of Egypt’s contributions to the arts and sciences to the question of whether Egyptians were white or black” (Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 187).

The author of this sentence makes the subject a concrete noun (physical anthropologists). It is immediately clear that the sentence is about the actions of these anthropologists. Were the sentence to lead, instead, with a nominalizatiion, the reader would likely need to read the sentence several times to understand it. 

A less-effective sentence would look something like: “The reduction of the question of Egypt’s contributions to the arts and sciences came down to whether Egyptians were white or black.”

**

Principle #2

Use active, vivid verbs (chew, disguise, immobilize) instead of forms of be (“The author is”) and tired academic verbs (“The study explores”).

Spotlight example (biology): “In researching this book, I had several scientists plead with me not to anthropomorphize the behavior of the nonhuman animals I describe here…. [A]lthough I sought not to dress every organism in this book in human accoutrements, some of that probably slipped in” (Emily Willingham, Phallacy, 10).

The author of these sentences energizes her writing with active verbs (plead, dress, slip), even as she also uses words (anthropomorphize, accoutrements) with which lay readers may not be as familiar. These vibrant verbs keep this scientific study light and accessible.

**

Principle #3

Be judicious with your use of it, this, that, and there. These words can sometimes signify lack of clarity. In the case of this or these, use only when modified by a noun (“This encounter captures” rather than “This captures”).

Spotlight example (literature): “The open hearth was large enough to feature an inglenook, where on a cold night one or two people could sit cozily in a recessed space next to the warming fire. And that’s where Shakespeare’s chair was put on display. This picturesque scene, reproduced in countless engravings made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was entirely fabricated…” (Richard Schoch, Shakespeare’s House, 19).

In the first two sentences, the author depicts a cozy, fireside space in one of Shakespeare’s family homes. In the final sentence, he references the description (“this picturesque scene”) to assert that no such room existed in the mid-sixteenth-century home. Had he omitted the noun (scene) from this sentence, it would have been unclear exactly what was fabricated.

**

Consider implementing these principles in your own writing, from a playful—not prescriptive—place.

Perhaps start with the paragraph beginning a new section of your article or book manuscript. Since readers will pay more attention to the beginning of a section, this area is the perfect place to practice writing stylish academic prose. Showcase your concrete nouns and active verbs. Play around with sentence structure. And ensure this or these is always accompanied by a noun!

For more of Sword’s sentence-level recommendations, see Chapter 5 in Stylish Academic Writing (2012).

Scare quotes and why to proceed with caution

You might be inadvertently conveying ambiguity and confusion in your scholarly writing!

This sometimes happens when you use quotation marks without quoting anything. These are also known as scare quotes.

Scare quotes interrupt the reader’s flow. They obligate the reader to pause and consider what you (the writer) might mean by them.

This is because writers sometimes use scare quotes as a stand-in for further explanation. So, in addition to forcing the reader to pause in their reading, scare quotes sometimes become an unhelpful writing shortcut that takes the place of much-needed context or explanation.

Take, for example, the following sentences:

1. Before: The Inquisition prosecuted “heretics,” whose behavior challenged Catholicism.

   After: The Inquisition prosecuted seeming heretics, whose behavior challenged Catholicism

2. Before: Cuba achieved “independence” from Spain in 1902.

   After: While Cuba technically became independent from Spain in 1902, the new country remained occupied by the US military.

3. Before: Homosexuals were “deviants” who threatened accepted understandings of morality and citizenship.

   After: Many physicians viewed homosexuals as “deviants” who threatened accepted understandings of morality and citizenship.

In #1, the writer puts scare quotes around “heretics” to indicate that just because the Inquisition prosecuted these individuals does not mean that they were guilty of crimes against Catholicism. In these cases, “seeming” or “so-called” can be added to the sentence to clarify the meaning.

In #2, the writer is using quotes to indicate that Cubans initially achieved a contingent independence, as the territory remained occupied by the United States, even after its independence from Spain. In this case, additional context (beyond a word or two) is necessary.

In #3, the writer mobilizes scare quotes to explain a historical viewpoint without seeming to adopt the language of the time. As an editor, I’m not opposed to the use of scare quotes around “deviant,” particularly if the term is used in the author’s sources. However, in the original sentence, accompanying the writer’s use of scare quotes is a lack of clarity about who held this view. My updated sentence reflects that it was physicians who held this viewpoint.

If your writing tends to include a lot of scare quotes, take some time to review your purpose for using them. They may reveal ambiguity that, once addressed, will improve your writing!