Howard, checking the Style manual might be a good start.
There are different approaches to title case – the most obvious being that US
English style capitalises every word in a title (including ‘A’).
Personally I am totally against title case (I recommend sentence case) for the
simple reason that title case masks words that should be capitalised.
However, one standard for title case is to capitalise everything except ‘a’,
‘an’, ‘and’, ‘of’ and ‘the’.
A more energetic standard exempts those and all prepositions (which would
include relatively long words like ‘between’, ‘without’ and ‘throughout’)
I haven’t come across a standard for title case that excludes pronouns from
capitalisation, nor one where only major words are capitalised. (Not to say
there isn’t one)
Note that in some earlier English texts it was the practice to capitalise all
nouns – not only in the title but in the body text. I believe this is still the
case in modern-day German.
From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Howard Silcock
Sent: Friday, 1 July 2016 2:24 PM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: atw: Capitalising titles
What are the rules you've been told about which words should be capitalised in
titles? Many usage books now favour minimal capitalisation - where you only
capitalise the first word and any proper nouns or other words normally
capitalised - and I've been following this recently. However, some people still
want to use the older scheme where you capitalise only "major" words - though
there seems to be different ideas about which words are "major".
I decided to write a macro that I could run to apply this type of
capitalisation and tried to make a list of all the words that wouldn't be
capitalised. This is my initial list:
"the", "a", "an", "of", "and", "or", "but", "to", "is", "for", "from", "with",
"after", "before", "if", "in", "on", "over", "under", "by", "that", "which",
"who", "until", "till", "your", "my", "his", "her", "hers", "their", "as", "so".
I think some people want to capitalise all verbs, so I'd have to remove "is",
but that looks silly to me. Anyone got any other ideas?
Howard
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