In everyday life, we frequently come across multiple different ways of writing the date. Whether writing an email, entering your date of birth on a form or reading a formal letter, there seem to be many options for how one chooses to write the day, month and year. Although these different ways are usually understood in a variety of contexts, in academic writing there is one standardised format which you should not deviate from when writing a paper.
The name of the month should be spelled out in full and never abbreviated. ‘January’ would never be ‘Jan’, for example. The day of the month should always be written in number form. Although elsewhere in academic writing numbers below twelve should be written as a word, this is not the case when writing the date. It would therefore be written, ‘August 7’ rather than ‘August seven’. The number should be left standing alone and shouldn’t be followed by a ‘th’ or a ‘st’ in superscript. The correct form is therefore ‘December 25’ rather than ‘December 25th’. There is no need for a comma before the year, so the correct way to write the date in academic writing is:‘August 7 2014’
There is no need to include the day of the week unless there is some specific reason you would like to highlight it. One might, for example, write ‘Friday August 13’ to remind the reader that this is considered by some to be an unlucky day, but otherwise the day of the week is unnecessary.
It should be noted that the date is written in a different order in American English and British English. This can easily lead to confusion. The British write day/month/year whilst it is customary in the US to write month/day/year. This means that
‘06/11/14’
would mean 6 November 2014 in the UK but June 11 2014 in the US. When the day of the month is twelve or above this becomes slightly more obvious to readers on either side of the pond but be aware of this difference in formatting so you aren’t tripped up! The only other places in the world which write the date with the American format are Belize and Canada.