: How to keep documents with example full date timeless I am writing a corporate guidelines manual. The manual itself is made in InDesign, and contains sample documents in it that show employees

Vote Up Vote Down

One device sometimes used is to use hyphens or underscores or X's instead of the last couple of digits of the year. Like instead of writing, "May 1, 2016" write "May 1, 20--", "May 1, 20__", or "May 1, 20XX". This might conceivably confuse a reader into thinking that they are supposed to put dashes or whatever instead of the full year, but I think most readers would get the idea.

Somewhat like Monica Cellio's answer, I've sometimes used dates of well-known events in cases like this. Like "December 7, 1941" or "July 4, 1776". (Significant dates in the US. If you're from another country, use well-known dates from your history.) I have sometimes worried, though, that using such far-past dates will be distracting.

Another option is to just not worry about it. I've often read manuals and books that have a sample form or letter or whatever with a date that is a few years past, and I generally think nothing of it. If it's far enough past, I may notice and wonder when the book was written.

I suppose a lot depends on whether the reader expects the manual to be "up to date". If I was reading a book about, say, how to grow tomatoes in your back yard, that probably hasn't changed much over time, so if I realized the book was 30 years old I'd be likely to shrug it off. If I was reading a book about tax law, that changes all the time and I'd be concerned that an old book might be out of date. And of course something about computers or cell phones could be out of date within a couple of years. My point being, if readers realize that the manual was written 5 years ago, will they care? If you're talking about a company procedures manual or something like that, I presume your readers will assume that if the manual was not up to date, the company wouldn't still be using it, so this is probably a non-issue.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

You are concerned that a document containing a recent, past date (like from last year) will make readers think your document is out of date. One way to address that is to use dates that are obviously not recent -- Jan 1 1970, Dec 31 2037, etc.

If you have a section in the frontmatter about document conventions (the place where documents sometimes talk about special formatting), consider adding a note there saying that you've used ficticious dates in preference to placeholders like "YYYY".

(0)