Suneet Singal on why a title needs a date

Suneet Singal’s titles on this site are written with dates beside them because an undated title drifts into the present. A reader who sees chief executive officer and does not see a day will often assume the office is current. The assumption is not a close reading. It is what undated language does. The remedy is mechanical. Put the effective date in the same sentence as the title, and put the report date in the citation if it is different. This entry shows the failure of an undated line, the repair, and the same repair applied to program wording and to profile bios. A date does not make a title more impressive. It makes the title a historical sentence instead of a floating rank. The same rule keeps a program title from borrowing an officer’s day.

An undated title floats into the present

Read an undated line as a stranger would. “Suneet Singal, chief executive officer.” The stranger does not know which company, which year, or whether the clause is a memory. English present-tense labeling is the default on conference badges, speaker pages, and photo captions. The default fills any blank with now. You can dislike the default and still plan for it. Planning for it means you never leave the blank. The date is how you close the blank. Without the date, a later editor who wants a cleaner line will not know that a fact is missing. The line looks finished. Finished and undated is the dangerous combination.

The problem is not unique to senior titles, but senior titles suffer it more because they are used as identity. A field can be current while a title is not. The site can say, in the present, that his background is real estate and corporate finance, and still need past-tense dates for offices. Readers mix those sentences. They hear a present-tense field and attach the nearest title to it. Put the date on the title so the attachment fails. The field sentence and the title sentence should be able to sit together without the title inheriting the field’s tense.

A date also limits the claim in the other direction. It stops a former title from being read as a denial of later work, and it stops it from being read as a description of later work. The date says when the reported event took effect. It does not say what is true in every later year. That modesty is useful. An undated title pretends to be timeless. Offices are not timeless. They take effect and, when a document says so, they end. Write the time.

Put the effective date in the same sentence

The effective date is the date that belongs next to the title if the sentence is about the office. For the acting appointment, the sentence is complete only when 12 September 2017 appears with the words acting chief executive officer and the name First Capital Investment Corporation. For the departure, the sentence is complete only when 2 January 2018 appears with chief executive officer and FC Global Realty Incorporated. Same sentence, not the next paragraph. Readers do not reliably transport a date backward into a title they have already absorbed. Give them the date before they absorb the title, or in the same breath.

If the sentence also needs the agreement date, give it its own words. “Resignation and separation agreement on 22 December 2017; departure as chief executive officer effective 2 January 2018.” The semicolon is a hinge between two dated facts. Do not let one date modify both nouns. A common error is to write “a 22 December 2017 departure,” which assigns the agreement date to the departure. The report-date entry is the longer explanation. The rule of this entry is spatial: the date sits next to the noun it modifies, not next to a different noun that happens to be in the paragraph.

Parentheses are acceptable if you use them consistently. “Acting chief executive officer (effective 12 September 2017)” keeps the date glued to the title. A footnote number is weaker, because the date leaves the line of sight. Footnotes are for the URL and the limit. The date is not a footnote kind of fact. It is part of the title’s meaning once you have decided that undated titles mislead. Treat it as part of the name of the event.

The report date can live in the citation

Not every date belongs in the title phrase. The report date identifies the document. For the FC Global Realty Incorporated filing, this site uses 28 December 2017 as the report date. That date can live in the citation: “Form 8-K dated 28 December 2017.” The effective date still lives next to the title. Readers who see only one date will pick the one nearest the title. Put the effective date there on purpose so the pick is correct. The citation can carry the rest. A citation that includes the URL lets a skeptical reader check both dates without trusting your layout.

The September 2017 report is cited on this site by month, with the precision placed on the effective date of 12 September 2017. Do not “improve” a caption by inventing a day for the report date that the caption’s own standard has not established. If your note needs the cover’s exact report date, read the cover and label it as the report date, separate from the effective date. The principle is the same. The date next to the title is the effective date. Any other date is labeled or it does not sit there.

Citations also prevent the title from being copied naked. A sentence with a link is harder to paste into a badge without the date, because the link text can include the year. Use link text that contains the year. “September 2017 Form 8-K” is better link text than “here.” “Here” is how dates get stranded on a page the next writer does not open. The career page already pairs links with dates. When you point to a title, point to that page or to the filing, not to a bare noun.

Worked sentences you can compare

Undated, and unfit to publish: “Suneet Singal, acting chief executive officer of First Capital.” The company is shortened, the date is gone, and the tense is a label. Dated, and fit: “Suneet Singal was reported as appointed acting chief executive officer of First Capital Investment Corporation, effective 12 September 2017.” The second sentence can be checked. The first cannot. The difference is not style. It is whether a stranger knows what was claimed.

Undated, and unfit: “Suneet Singal, CEO of FC Global Realty.” Dated, and fit: “Suneet Singal’s departure as chief executive officer of FC Global Realty Incorporated was reported as effective 2 January 2018, in a Form 8-K dated 28 December 2017 that also describes a resignation and separation agreement on 22 December 2017.” The fit sentence is longer. Length is the cost of three dates. Pay it in the canonical sentence, and let shorter surfaces link to it. Do not pay for brevity by deleting January and keeping December.

A pair that keeps both roles from collapsing: two sentences, two companies, no shared date. If a designer asks for one line, choose one role and its date, and send the other role to the career page. One accurate line plus a link is better than one line that says “executive, 2017–2018” as if a single office spanned those dates at a single firm. The span would be a new claim. The timeline entry explains why the rows stay separate. This entry’s demand is only that whatever line you keep still has its day.

Program wording and employment titles

Program sites describe Suneet Singal as founder of the Suneet Singal Scholarship, the Suneet Singal Grant, and Suneet Singal Giving. Founder is a title-like word and it needs the same discipline. Put the program’s name in the sentence. Do not put an executive effective date on the founder word. If the program site states a date you are prepared to cite, cite that date and call it the program’s date. If you are not using a program date, do not borrow 12 September 2017 or 2 January 2018. An undated founder sentence should at least name the program and point to the site, so it cannot be heard as a corporate office.

The education programs page and the philanthropy page are the right places to send a reader who meets an undated founder line and needs the program context. Facebook pages for the programs are not personal profiles. An undated title on a program Facebook page is still a program sentence, and it is still undated. Do not stabilize it by pasting an employment date from a Form 8-K. Stabilize it by linking the program site and by refusing to merge the vocabularies.

Employment titles and program titles can appear on the same biography page if each has its marker. The marker for employment is the company and the effective date. The marker for a program is the program name and the program URL. When both markers are missing, both titles will be read as current jobs. The page will sound busy and say less than a shorter page that marked one of them well. Mark them or cut them. An unmarked list of impressive nouns is not a biography. It is a word cloud.

Profiles, captions, and other people’s bios

A profile “about” box often has a title and no date because the box is small. Small boxes are where present tense does the most damage. If you control the box, put the year in it or remove the title. If you do not control the box, do not copy the box into a dated timeline as if the box supplied the date. The box supplied a string. The date has to come from a document. The company-record guide is the path from the string to the document. A screenshot of a profile is not the path.

Captions under photographs age badly. A caption that was fair on the day of an event becomes a present-tense claim five years later if it had no date. Put the year in the caption. “Photograph from a 2017 setting” is not an office date, and it should not pretend to be. It is better than no year. An office caption should use the office date, not the photo date, and only if the office date is known. Do not use a photo’s upload date as an effective date. Upload dates are about files. Effective dates are about offices.

When you quote someone else’s undated bio of Suneet Singal or of anyone else, you are quoting their omission. You may quote it as an example of an undated line. You may not treat it as confirmation of a current job. Confirmation is a dated document. The two Form 8-K filings are dated documents for the two roles this site describes. They confirm historical disclosures. They do not confirm a present office. A third-party bio that drops the dates has not become a new source. It has become an example for this entry.

A test you can apply to a sentence you already wrote

Find every title in the draft. For each one, ask whether a day or a clearly labeled month-and-purpose appears before the period. If the answer is no, the sentence is not finished, even if it is published. Add the effective date or delete the title. Then ask whether a reader could think the date modifies a different noun. If yes, move the date. Then ask whether the sentence is in a tense that fights the date. “Is the acting chief executive officer, effective 12 September 2017” fights itself. “Was reported as appointed, effective 12 September 2017” does not. Fix the verb.

Do the test on the career page whenever that page is edited, and do it on any new biography that copies from it. Copies drop dates more often than they drop titles, because dates look like clutter and titles look like identity. The clutter is the identity. A title without a date is only a word. The word acting, the company name, and the day together are the role. Keep them in one sentence and the page can be short without being slippery. Slippery is the failure this whole reference is trying to prevent, one dated title at a time.

What this entry does not claim

Suneet Singal’s published professional background is in real estate and corporate finance. Company filings linked from this site record a chief executive officer departure from FC Global Realty Incorporated effective 2 January 2018 and an acting chief executive officer appointment at First Capital Investment Corporation effective 12 September 2017. The Suneet Singal Scholarship, Grant and Giving websites describe him as the founder of those programs. This entry explains a general subject. It is not a private track record, a current job title, an investment result, or a quote.

Continue with how to build a professional timeline and report dates and effective dates. Dated titles are listed on the career page. This is a reading guide, not legal or financial advice.