Pimp my English | Using capital letters

By Anna Malczyk

There are only a few, easy rules to remember when using capital letters. The most important thing to remember is that capital letters are rare in normal writing. When in doubt, use lower case!.

Capital letters for proper nouns
There are two types of nouns: proper nouns represent unique things (e.g. the names of people and places), while common nouns represent non-unique (or common!) things. Proper nouns take capital letters.

My sister’s name is Mary.
I’m going on holiday to the Royale Hotel in Venice, Italy.
We’re going to the Nedbank Publishing Conference next month.

Here’s a slightly trickier example:

In his first speech, President Barack Obama promised health care to all. (Here, “President” is part of his name, which is a proper noun).
Barack Obama is the president of the United States. (Here, “president” is used as a common noun, because it is a common word to describe the position he holds.)

Sometimes, when we want to show that something is significant, we use capital letters Like This, because the capital part is Very Important. In most cases, this is wrong. Here is an example:

The Super-User course has 10 Modules and is perfect for Businesspeople, Mothers and Students.

Here, the words “Modules”, “Businesspeople”, “Mothers” and “Students” should not be capitalised, because they are common words and not proper nouns. The correct version is:

The Super-User course has 10 modules and is perfect for businesspeople, mothers and students.

Initial capital letters
1. As everybody knows, every sentence starts with a capital letter.

Every sentence starts with a capital letter.

2. For headings and headlines, you should use an initial capital letter and lower-case letters for all the rest (except, of course, where there is a proper noun).

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The only exception to this is if a title contains a colon (:). The letter after the colon should be capital. This rule only applies to headings and headlines, and never to normal sentences.

[Headline] Computers today: Learning how to use them well
[Normal sentence] Computers today: learning how to use them is tricky.

Capital letters for acronyms
Acronyms are generally written in capitals.

The United Nations becomes UN.
Search engine optimisation becomes SEO.
Intellectual property becomes IP.

Remember! Using capital letters correctly is an important part of grammar.

On a lighter note, here’s a fun article about the huge financial mistakes that can happen when people get simple grammar wrong: http://allthingsmundane.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/just-file-it-under-oops-7-costly-clerical-errors/.

Related articles
Commas and semicolons
Hyphenating adjectives
Writing simply

This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution license.