I don't know where all of you get this idea that Americans capitalise every
word in a title. Is it because Microsoft Word has an option to capitalise
each word -and, of course, Microsoft's an American company? The Chicago,
MLA and AP style guides (all American) all have detailed rules for how to
capitalise (they'd say 'capitalize') titles. None of them recommend
capitalising every word. Besides, just look at any American book or
newspaper.
Having raised this topic, I did some looking around and found that style
guides' recommendations generally involve a combination of criteria.
Principally, they look at what part of speech each word is. Usually they
capitalise nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and subordinating
conjunctions. (So I should write "Is".) But another criterion is the length
of the words - some say to capitalise prepositions longer than some number
of letters.
Nevertheless, my approach of specifying a list of not-to-be-capitalised
words seems to work reasonably well in practice. And I can't write a macro
that detects what part of speech a word is.
Like Bede, I prefer minimal capitalisation for titles and headings. But
often there's a house style already in place.
Howard
On Friday, 1 July 2016, SUNTER Bede <Bede.SUNTER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
, 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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