What is the accepted style for writing a date when it is used in a
quote.  Example: The general said "The invasion is scheduled for June
6, 1944."  Should 1944 be spelled out?, If so is it capitalized?  How
about the number 6?  Or can you just use numerals?

halejrb..

Thank you for a very interesting question.  The correct format for
dates when written depends on the usage.  When noting a year alone, it
should be expressed using numerals, unless used at the beginning of a
sentence.  When using the day and the month, it should be written
month, day, year.  Using your example, it would be "The invasion is
scheduled for June 6, 1944."  A few more rules regarding dates would
be that the months of March, April, May, June and July are never
abbreviated because the words are so short.  Also, when referring to
specific months and years, do not use commas between the two, such as
November 2002.

I hope you find the above information helpful.  If you need any
further clarification, please let me know.

Regards,

-THV

Search Strategy:
style for written numbers dates

References:
Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Edition
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedit/handbook/numberdate.html

York University Style Guide
http://www.yorku.ca/ycom/style/sg20.html

Well, this was a good answer, but I got kind of confused.  I know I
asked for a clarification once and didn't really get it.  Maybe tar
heel is the second person to tackle this question.

>>  When using the day and the month, it should be written
month, day, year. <<

While month, day, year may be common in the US, in Europe you will
find that day, month, year is more widely used.

This leads to a problem with all numeric dates, such that 05/04/03 has
several different meanings depending on the country of usage.
Information distributed across the Internet, is available to anyone
and anywhere in the world, so such misinterpretations occur very
often.

For numeric dates there is an International Standard (ISO 8601) that
uses YYYY-MM-DD for dates and 24-hour HH:MM:SS for times. This is
adopted in most countries of the world (US: ANSI X3.30 -- Europe: EN
28601 -- Japan: JIS X0301, etc), as well as being an Internet Standard
(RFC 3339).