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I am writing a technical document and I need to refer to the current point of time. Should I say 'at the time of writing', 'at the time of this writing', or 'at the time of writing this'? Are all acceptable?

Matt E. Эллен
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Chong Lip Phang
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2 Answers2

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While all will be understood, the convention in this situation is to use "at the time of writing".

Alternatively you could say "as of October 2014".

"At the time of writing we had just declared war with IS."

"As of October 2014 the tax rate is 20%."

Community
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curiousdannii
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    I have to say I like the "As of [date]" the most out of the available options. Thank for your comment. – schalkneethling Apr 14 '16 at 08:25
  • I am writing my master thesis now and I would like to write the current version of the software I'm using. Should I write "At the time of writing the version of X was 2.0"? It feels weird to talk about the present in a past tense. – Babyburger Dec 05 '16 at 12:12
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    @Babyburger The present is an illusion - by the time you've written it the time of writing is already in the past ;) – curiousdannii Dec 05 '16 at 13:17
  • @curiousdannii That makes sense I suppose. But then my following sentence would be "This is the version I use throughout the thesis.". This feels confusing to the reader as I'm mixing past tense and present tense. However, it doesn't feel correct to change it to "This was the version I used throughout the thesis." as the version I used won't change. – Babyburger Dec 06 '16 at 11:22
  • By the way, the SAP manual I have starts often with "At the time of this writing, the MT600 printer supports only 7-bit country-specific character sets." so i got used to "At the time of this writing..." – BastianW Jan 25 '17 at 18:27
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    I've also more used to "at the time of this writing" for whatever reason but I'm not a native speaker. – Dan M. Jan 17 '19 at 12:46
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I would suggest that it line up with the acronym for this phrase: Acronym of abbreviation for "At the time of writing this document"?

ATTOW

Which is exactly how the answer is written.

aaiezza
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