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 at least 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.