Fun with capital letters
This article
is about the use and misuse of capital letters in English writing. Like
the use of apostrophes, there’s a level of
disagreement on this topic that some writers might find surprising.
Still, there are certain conventions and, if you want your writing to be
taken seriously, it’s as well to know what they are.
Note
Nothing in this article applies to poetry. In poetry, you can do as you please.
General principle
There are a few places where all serious writers use capital letters. Then there are some places where capitalization is a matter of style, and different publications have their own rules. If you can’t articulate a reason to use a capital letter in a particular place, don’t use one. If in doubt, it’s nearly always better to miss out a capital letter, than to use one where it isn’t needed.
The word ‘I’
Everybody capitalizes the word ‘I’ (referring to oneself). It’s one of the few places where all writers seem to agree.
The starts of sentences, headings, titles, and captions
Almost every writer starts every sentence with a capital letter. It’s an important way to make reading more fluent. Headings, titles, and captions, while not strictly sentences, usually start with a capital letter. Some writers may capitalize other words in headings and titles – more on that point later.
Proper nouns
Proper nouns are the names of people, countries, days and months, products, and many other things. Writing personal names (“Fred Bloggs”) without capital letters is an affectation. It’s a myth that the poet EE Cummings wrote his name without capitals – but his publishers did. It’s striking to see a personal name written that way, because it’s so unusual.
Except for personal names, there’s no universal agreement about what constitutes a proper noun – it’s a surprisingly difficult concept to define exactly. We almost always capitalize names of countries and specific places, along with months and days. In my youth we wrote “Summer” and “Autumn” (or “Fall”), but capitals here are out of fashion now.
Personal titles are usually capitalized when they refer to a specific person, or are used in a address. So we have “The Prime Minister said today…”, but “The duties of a prime minister are…” The first refers to the individual, the second to the office. But it’s not uncommon to see “Prime Minister” and “Lord Chancellor” and so on, even when they don’t refer to an individual. We usually write “Yes, Minister?” because “Minister” here is an address to a specific individual.
Product names usually get capitals, but some product names can also be common words or phrases. In that case, they should probably not be capitalized except when referring to the product. “Personal Computer” is a product originally made by IBM, but “personal computer” could apply to any small computer. It’s probably polite to write “iPhone” rather than “IPhone”, despite the irregular capitalization, because Apple does.
Names of events and holidays are often capitalized (“Christmas”, “Easter”). Practices vary for names that are long, and made up of common words. Do we need to capitalize every word in “East Dogpatch Annual Cheese-Rolling Competition”? Maybe not.
There are many, many edge cases in this area but, on the whole, it’s usually clear whether a noun is a name, and needs its capital. When it isn’t clear, it’s probably because there simply isn’t a right answer. Was there a “Cuban Missile Crisis” or a “Cuban missile crisis”? Both variants are in widespread use, and it’s difficult to say that either is ‘wrong’.
Pronouns
Other than “I” we almost never capitalize pronouns in English, unless they have to be capitalized for some other reason – they begin a sentence, for example. A historic exception is the use of “He” and “His” to refer to God. While standard in my schooldays, even very devout writers don’t seem to write this way now. The practice hasn’t completely faded away, however.
Abbreviations
We almost always use capital letter for abbreviations (“USA”, “UFO”). Increasingly, writers are turning away from capitalizing acronyms (abbreviations that can be read as words) that amount to novel words, like “scuba”, “nimby”, and “yuppie”.
Acronyms that amount to common words are usually still capitalized, whether they are pronounced as words or not. So we still have “NICE” rather than “nice”.
Words derived from proper nouns
We’re moving into greyer areas from this point on.
While nearly everybody uses capital letters on nearly every proper noun (leaving aside oddities like “iPhone”), there’s less agreement on whether to use capitals on ‘proper adjectives’. For example, we write “England”, but what about “English”? Does it matter whether it’s “English people”, the “the English language”, or “the full English”? What about nouns derived from proper nouns – is it “Englishmen” or “englishmen”?
What if a proper noun is not at the start of a word, but elsewhere in the word. Would you describe a person’s behaviour as “unEnglish”, or “unenglish”, or “un-English”? It’s an ugly word, with or without capitals, but there are plenty of similar examples.
What if the word is a derogatory one? Should we write “Balkanization” or “balkanization?”
Where words are variants of a proper noun, most writers will use a capital letter unless the result would be ugly (which is, of course, subjective), but it’s far from universal. It seems to me that writers are strict about capitalizing words derived from proper nouns when the words have most of their letters in common: “England” and “English” both start with “Engl-”. But I often see “martian” (“Are we going to be invaded by martians?”) rather than “Martian”. “Mars” is the name of something, and “Martian” seems more accurate to me. But “Venus” is a name, and we don’t usually write “Venereal” when talking about disease. Of course, many people don’t know that “Venereal” is derived from “Venus”.
In short, most writers seem to capitalize words derived from proper nouns when the connection between the words is very clear, and they are spelled similarly. The less obvious the connection, the less the compulsion to capitalize.
Abbreviated and referential names
Many writers capitalize part of a name, even if that part is just a common word or phrase. “National Health Service” is a name, but it’s often abbreviated to “the Health Service”, or even just “the Service”. Similarly, if I’m writing about East Dogpatch Hospital, it would be fine to write “The Hospital has 300 beds…” if “Hospital” is a short form of “East Dogpatch Hospital”. But it would also be perfectly acceptable to write “The hospital…” in the same circumstances – “hospital” itself, after all, does not name anything.
A related problem is whether to capitalize common words that stand for names.
For example, “Surrey” is the name of a county in England (and elsewhere), and would always be capitalized. It’s less clear whether to capitalize “County” in “The County of Surrey”. “Surrey County” is definitely a name, and deserves its capitals. “County of Surrey” is less obviously a name, but I suspect most writers would capitalize “County” here.
“County”, of course, is not a name in itself. But there was a time when it would have been capitalized when used as a reference to some specific county. So, for example: “I live in Surrey, and the authorities in the County have decided…”
Similarly: “Are you going to the Company meeting today?” At school I would have capitalized “Company” if it was referring to a specific company, even if I had not mentioned that Company (see, I did it again). We capitalized words like this if the context made it clear that they were references to specific, named entities, whether we used the names or not.
Almost anything that is unique can have references like this. Nearly always it would be odd to capitalize them. I wouldn’t capitalize “Friend” in “I have a friend called Fred”. The problem with this kind of capitalization is that it tends to leak: you could probably find a justification to capitalize anything on the grounds that it’s a reference to a named entity.
Consequently, when I was at school, we had a huge list of words that should be capitalized when used to refer to a specific person or thing. I couldn’t remember it then, and I can’t remember it now. In general, it’s probably best to avoid using capitalization this way, and it’s a capitalization practice that definitely seems to be on the decline.
Headings and captions
Until about fifty years ago, it was conventional to capitalize most of the words in a heading, however long it was. We almost never capitalized conjunctions (“and”, “but”…) or articles (“the”, “an”…) unless they began the sentence, but we capitalized everything else.
I don’t think anybody would consider it wrong to do this now, but it’s less popular, even in the most formal publications. The Times no longer capitalizes article headings, but it does capitalize section headings (e.g., “Life & Style”).
If you’re writing for a specific publication, the publishers will almost certainly have rules about capitalization of headings.
Titles
I’m sure most (all?) writers would write at least the first word of a title with a capital; beyond that, it’s not so clear. Capitalizing “Breaking Bad” looks fine, but all the capitals in “Doctor Strangelove: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love the Bomb” are overpowering. The good thing about capitalizing all the words in a title is that it makes it stand out from the rest of the sentence. However, we can get the same effect these days using text styles. My personal preference is to use italic text for titles, and only capitalize the first word.
Starts of clauses
Everybody starts a sentence with a capital letter, but there’s no general agreement on whether to capitalize the first word of a clause that is short of a whole sentence.
For example: there’s no particular reason to capitalize the first word after a colon. But many writers do, and the practice is definitely on the increase. I don’t usually use capitals after colons when writing for myself, but some of the publications I’ve written for – particularly in the US – require me to.
Summary
There’s no good reason to sprinkle capital letters all over your text. If you capitalize the word “I”, names, abbreviations, and the first word of each sentence, your work will be perfectly readable. If you capitalize anything else, you should be able to explain why.
