Numbers. Dates

The content of these guidelines is taken from the Vives University Network’s Interuniversity Style Guide for Writing Institutional Texts, an interuniversity project in which the UPC participated with the support of the Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Government of Catalonia.

• Dates
  
• Days of the week
• Years
• Decades
  

Dates

• Do not use the endings -st, -nd, -rd or -th with a figure in a date. Note that, in British English, dates are written in the order day–month–year, without internal punctuation.
  
  

  16 July 2010

• In British English, the numeric form of the date above is, therefore:
  
  

  16/07/10

• Note that, in American English, dates are written in the order month–day–year, with a comma between the day and the year.
  
  

  July 16, 2010

• In American English, the numeric form of the date above is, therefore:
  
  

  07/16/10

Days of the week

• Do not use a comma after the day of the week when it precedes a date.
  
  

  Tuesday 6 July 2010

Years

• In running text, use all four digits when referring to a year (1971, not '71). Academic years should be hyphenated thus:
  
  

  the 2011-2012 academic year

Decades

• Use numbers to refer to decades rather than writing them out. Do not add an apostrophe before the plural -s.
  
  

  We were all born in the mid-1920s.

• In the case of the period 2000 to 2020, use a circumlocution such as the first decade of the twenty-first century or the second decade of the twenty-first century.