At the end of the day, it's really your choice how you do it, and my choice is that I like doing some things the professional way. On my YouTube videos, for example, every one of them, except for the early ones as I can't remember the exact dates, has this for the description: "This video was recorded on January 1, 2016." (Obviously, that's an example date.) However, my playlists just have stuff like: February 22, 2016 - March 22, 2016 or July 14, 2016 - Present, and so on. (Note: Those are regular hyphens (spaced), but I recently learned that when it comes to ranges, en-dashes are more appropriate.) In that case, I feel like it would just be too much to have something like, "This project began on February 22, 2016, and ended on March 22, 2016" or "This project began on July 14, 2016, and is still ongoing." I just feel like that's a bit much and why I don't have it like on my video descriptions. Anyway, I started changing my playlists' date range format earlier, but I stopped because I wasn't sure what the professional format for a date range is. What is the professional way to do ranges? See the poll. For the en-dash in particular with ranges, I think the professional way is without spacing. Vote!
In these situations, I prefer it written out, but you're essentially voting for the first option, it looks like.
i tend to format it this way unless i'm doing some kind of paper or formal assignment that says otherwise this is how i see most people writing it out though to be honest
@Cat~: So you don't personally think it's repetition or unprofessional to write the year twice if the date range is within the same year? For example, January 1, 2016–February 1, 2016 compared to January 1–February 1, 2016? (Now, if the range is something like December 15, 2015–January 22, 2016, there's of course no way to question with it.) I'm going to have this poll close a week from tomorrow: July 31. Please vote! Your votes and feedback will be highly appreciated.
Personally I think it looks better as 1 January 2016 - 1 February 2016 as I'm British and that's the order our dates are written but in this instance do you really need to specify the day? 'June - August 2016' also works. I suppose the amount of detail you need depend on the amount of time spent there, if you were only there a month then dates might be important, if you were there like half a year then you may only need months (not exact days) and if you're there for years, you probably only need to specify the years you were there between. I don't think I'm really helping here, just giving you more options.
It's just for my video game projects. Example: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6rb0tk_rHTLtTyKwCwi6yu6zgzcvrKuT
lol, I have no idea what's professional or not, but I think the second one (spaced en-dash) just looks better.
Remember this poll is closing on August 1 at 12:00 AM. Please keep voting and providing feedback! Special thanks to @Cat~ for attempting to get it going again before I returned.
None of them are bad, just personal preference. Personally I would space the endash just because if word wrapping becomes a thing you don't want the piece before to get dragged down. (although if that actually happens varies, and I'm not sure how browsers normally handle it).
@Mixt, could you provide an example of what you mean? Edit: Although I don't have to worry about wrapping with YouTube playlist descriptions.
And the winner is option #1! So I'll be changing from January 1, 2016 - February 1, 2016 to January 1, 2016–February 1, 2016. Spaced hyphen to non-spaced en-dash. In addition, even if the year in the first part of the range is the same as the year in the second part of the range, I'll still include it as seen above.
