Capitalize your capitals and capitols!

Just a note to open my post today: I will not be doing a Book Store Series this week. I am in the middle of an editing project and simply do not have time to put a proper amount of energy into writing a decent piece. If all goes well, the series will continue next Thursday, as scheduled. Thank you for your patience!

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One thing that writers often stress about is capitalization. It's nothing to worry about, especially if you have an editor! I'm going to give you some quick tips and tricks to get you through the basics.

Firstly, there are two general writing styles when it comes to capitalization: down style and up style. It's pretty much how it sounds; up style means that more nouns and adjectives have upper case initial letters, while down style is the dominant style for writing, and that tends to limit the amount of capitalization that occurs in a project. 

A lot of authors really don't care much where upper and lowercase letters are used in their writing. They simply want to get their story out there and have no preference as to which style is applied to their work. Some authors use capitalization to give importance or entitlement to certain words in their work to create emphasis. For example, I had an author who capitalized the word "District" in her work. Without a proper name to accompany it, there would not normally be an uppercase "D". Because her story revolved around the concept of a "District", that became the proper name of the areas that were being referred to. It really comes down to the style of the work being edited and can be decided collectively by everyone involved in producing a piece. Ultimately, it is the author's decision and approval editors are looking for.

So crash course time:
Proper names/nicknames/suffixes

James Doe

James Doe, Jr.

Jimmy

If someone (ex: e.e. cummings) is "branded" by lowercase letters, it's up to the author how they decide to write these out. Technically, capitalizing is correct and accepted, but if you'd like to stay true to the person's brand/logo, I have only one piece of advice: try to steer clear of beginning a sentence with said person's name. Beginning a sentence with a lowercase letter can be confusing and awkward. Restructure your sentence so the name appears somewhere in the middle.

Titles/Offices

President Obama

the president

American president

American president Hoover

As you can see, combined with the name and office, both are capitalized. 'American' is always capitalized. 

Geographical locations

City names and nicknames are both capitalized. New York City/the Big Apple, Bay Area, Big Easy, etc.

Direction names: going north or west, living in the Midwest, East coast. Using the direction to tell where someone is going; not capital. A region named for the direction in which it lies; capital.

Terms coming from places; not capital. Ex: venetian blinds, arabic numerals

Resident names: New Yorker, Floridian, Hawaiian

Company/Trademarks

Generally, they're always capital. Exceptions, of course, occur here too. Basically, if a brand name is used so frequently that it is part of a society's vernacular, it can be lowercased. For example: jello, styrofoam, ping-pong and dumpster are all brand names, but because they are so widely known, they can be lowercase. 

Titles of work

There are three rules you can use:

Chicago style: All prepositions are lowercase (to, for, with, through)

Four-letter rule: Prepositions longer than four letters are capitalized (With, Through, for)

Five-letter rule: Prepositions longer than five letters are capitalized (with, Through, for)

Those are the most basic rules without overwhelming you. There are many more "sub-rules" and special situations, but if you come across it, you can always look it up. 

Thanks for stopping by!!

**Credit for this post goes to Amy Einsohn, The Copyeditor's Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications. A lot of my information came from this book. Thank you Amy!