On Capitals

When I used to think of capitals, Paris, Madrid, Bangkok, Rome and my home city of Edinburgh sprang to mind, with imaginings of holidays in the sun (not always of course) and visions of visits to art galleries and historical monuments. Now that I'm an academic proofreader, when I think of capitals I think of capital letters - most of all that rather annoying phenomenon - 'random capitalisation'. This is something I encounter a lot and something which also causes me extreme frustration and to be honest occasional confusion. This post is intended to help you avoid misusing capital letters.


Historically speaking capitals appeared fairly frequently in English use to emphasise Important words; this practice fell out of fashion in the 1800s and increasingly more so recently; principally because the eye finds it easier to scan text that is written exclusively in lowercase. Nowadays capitalisation in sentences typically denotes proper nouns, acronyms and nothing else.

In the academic text, where headings for tables and figures within assignments are concerned, capitalisation of principal words abounds and this also remains a common phenomenon in the media. In general it is not preferred by many academic journals and style is moving in the direction of down playing use of capitalisation in this context. Where an up style is preferred it is usually stated in the journal guidelines and when proofing I generally prefer lowercase for labelling table and figures (except for the first letter); although I tend to accept the author's use of capitalisation in titles - with the proviso that conjunctions, articles and prepositions (unless they begin the sentence) are generally not to be capitalised - proper nouns and adjectives being the usual suspects in this case.

The worst thing is to capitalise everything to add emphasis - known in email speak as SHOUTING this is especially irritating and in an academic context does you no favours with your reader - some gentle bolding or italicising makes the point just as well (although I prefer to avoid these also unless very evidently necessary).

Capital letters should however appear in these instances:

• At the beginning of a sentence
• When using the the nominative singular pronoun - 'I'. 
• As the first letter of a sentence quoted within another sentence; i.e. Ackerman argued that "The response to bacteriophages alters according to . . ." 
• For acronyms, like WHO or when introducing them for the first time World Health Organisation (WHO)
• With proper nouns - O.K. this is much more complicated than it may seem and examples of other nouns that are commonly capitalised in English include: days of the week, place names, the second part of a street name (e.g. Main Avenue), languages, demonyms, taxa in scientific classifications, brand names (unless not, i.e. easyjet, iPod),
• Common nouns when used to represent a class are also capitalised, i.e.what manner of Man is he?
• With some legal English terms
• For honorifics and titles
• In all cases following either a [.], [?] or [!]
• When quoting titles that use them
• For the first word in lines of verse

Oh and yes, as many of you may be wondering about the word Internet, which is still on many occasions capitalised. It would appear that trends are fast moving away from this - as rather than considering it a unique singular thing, wherein Internet is a title, it is becoming and entity in itself no longer requiring a capital - the internet as part of the 21st century technoscape.

Generally the problems I encounter in the work I proofread in relation to capitalisation results from interference from other languages, which have their own unique rules so I would point out that if you are writing in English as a foreign language contacting a proofreader for help can be a capital idea!