Double-take, # 12

Des Pond of Slough was slightly puzzled by content in an email from the Open University:

He remarks: ‘I would assume that “modern advertising” was still using 13th- to 17th-century techniques, or have I fallen through a temporal anomaly?’

It’s also worth pointing out that the phrase ‘the 13th to 17th century’ needs another direct article, might benefit from pluralizing its noun (‘the 13th to the 17th centuries’), and would seem more elegant, and thus more professional, without the unnecessary abbreviations (thus: ‘the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries’), which might have resulted in fewer errors in the first place.