Date
- Do not use ordinals in dates (a July 2 meeting, not a July 2nd meeting).
- Do not abbreviate days or months in body text (meeting was held Tuesday, February 15, not Tues., Feb. 15).
- Set off the year from the month with a comma (e.g., June 1, 2018). However, if only the month and year are given, no comma is used (e.g., June 2018).
- Use this form for decades: 1960s (no apostrophe). When omitting the century, use left-facing apostrophe before the number: the ’60s, 1960s.
Time
- Time is written in figures, except noon and midnight.
- Use a.m. and p.m. (lowercase with periods) and shorten the time to just the hour when there are no minutes (leave off “:00”).
- Include the time zone when targeting a broad audience. To avoid confusion, do not reference “daylight” or “standard” (e.g., PT, MT, CT, ET, AT).
- Time zones are lowercase when written out (e.g., eastern time), except for proper nouns (like Atlantic or Pacific).
- Abbreviations are capitalized, without punctuation (e.g., we’re available from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET).
- Acceptable: 9 o’clock this morning; 8 in the evening.
- Redundant: 8 p.m. tonight.
- It’s acceptable to use dashes to indicate time ranges when used in tables (e.g., 5-7 p.m.)
Examples: 10 a.m., 10:30 a.m., noon, 2 to 4 p.m., midnight.
