Capital Ideas
Capitalizing Correctly for Fun and Profit
Welcome to a 2024 edition of Shelf Life, in which we are not emotionally prepared to go back to work tomorrow. Also, my word processor window looks weird, possibly because I haven’t looked at it in a while. I do not remember any of my work passwords. I have forgotten how to make smalltalk. I’ve been off work for a week and my brain has restarted. Someone please insert boot disk.
Once I got into an argument with someone online that it’s not really important to know the difference between capital and capitol unless you are an editor and actually not even then. The person was really dismayed by this because they felt that if anyone should know the difference, it’s an editor. I agree, I just don’t think anyone needs to know the difference. Grammar is colonial, first, and second, nobody won’t know what you’re talking about regardless whether you use an A or an O. If you write “capitol letter” or “capital building” people will understand what you meant. You will be technically wrong, but that’s the least important type of wrong, most of the time.
Capitol refers to a building in which a legislative body meets. For instance, the US Capitol Building in Washington DC and the surrounding neighborhood, which is named after the building, Capitol Hill. All other things are spelled with a second A instead of an O, as capital. This includes the capital city of a country (eg, Washington DC is the capital of the United States), money (eg, investment capital), crimes that may incur the death penalty (eg, capital murder or capital punishment), things that are fantastic but Britishly (eg, “capital idea old chap!”), and letters when they are taller than the other letters around them (eg, “type the capital letter F to pay respects”). Only spell it with an O if you are talking about a building.
I have a theory that the founding people or whoever named “the capitol building” meant “capital” but they spelled it wrong and now we have to all pretend that “capitol” was the correct and intended spelling because if you live in the US then the founding people are your saints and apostles. Sort of like how we don’t talk about Thomas Jefferson being a rapist or what George Washington’s “wooden teeth” were really made out of.
Well now you know when to use capitol and when to use capital so even if you stop reading now, you learned something. And if you already knew which capit*l was which, you can still learn something horrible by googling about George Washington’s teeth (don’t).
That was all a long tangent, though. Today’s Shelf Life is actually about when and how to capitalize words because this is a subject that causes a lot of heated discussion in most editorial offices I’ve encountered. The heated discussion is for two reasons:
Not all style manuals agree on capitalization rules, and
Many editors just don’t like the capitalization rules they’re handed by the style manual, so they make their own.
Most style manuals agree on the following:
The first word and last word of the title should always be capitalized, no matter what kind of word they are.
The first and last word of a subtitle (that is, after a colon, semicolon, or em dash) should always be capitalized.
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are always capitalized, regardless of their length.
Conjunctions like “and,” “but,” and “or” are always lowercased, unless rule 1 or 2 above applies.
Likewise, articles “a,” “an,” and “the” are always lowercased, unless rule 1 or 2 above applies.
Many style manuals diverge on the other rules. For example:
Under Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), prepositions are always lowercased (unless the first or last word of the title or subtitle), regardless of the length of the word—even if they are long, like “throughout,” “however,” “thereafter,” “between.”
APA Style, on the other hand, mandates capitalizing “major words” and defines “major words” as nouns, verbs (even short ones!), adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and all words of four letters or more including long prepositions.
Under CMS and APA, the both parts of a hyphenated compound will be capitalized: For example, “Best-in-Show Winners,” “First-Time Clients,” and “High-Quality Textiles.”
Under American Medical Association (AMA) style, though, the second part of a hyphenated compound is not necessarily capitalized. Do not capitalize the second part of the compound if the second part is a suffix (eg, “Office of the President-elect”) or if both parts comprise a single word in the dictionary you’re using (eg, if “short-term” appears as a single word in Merriam-Webster’s, then you would not capitalize the second part, as “Short-term Consequences.”).
However, also under AMA, you do capitalize the second half of the compound if both parts of the compound carry equal weight—which is on the editor to figure out.
In other words, style manuals are all over the place on capitalization. As an author, or as an editor working on a freelance basis with authors who may not know which style manual they’ll be held to (ie, authors who are not yet under contract with a publishing house), or as a person just trying to produce a professional-looking document, how can you know which capitalization style to use?
The best bet for authors and editors is to pick a manual and follow their capitalization style based on the type of content you’re handling—so, CMS for most fiction and nonscientific nonfiction, APA for most social sciences, AMA for most medical sciences, and so on. For anyone else, the best practice is to decide whether you’re going to lowercase all your prepositions regardless of length, or whether you’re going to uppercase anything four letters or longer. It’s also safest to capitalize both parts of a hyphenated compound in a title.
There are plenty of title case converters available for free on the web that will automatically style text you paste in. I like Capitalize My Title because it has a good selection of manuals to choose from and you can watch it lowercase or uppercase your sentence in real time as you type.
The other place I notice people—editors and layfolks alike—tend to get confused with capitalization is with people’s titles. It feels respectful to always capitalize someone’s professional or honorary title, so I notice people err on the side of always capitalizing people’s titles:
When Barack Obama was President of the United States, he lived in the White House.
Former Senator Barack Obama now lives in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, DC.
Michelle Obama was a Lawyer at Sidley Austin and then the Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago before she became the First Lady.
However, the general rule for capitalizing people’s titles is to capitalize titles when they precede the person’s name or when used as a direct form of address. For instance:
“Former President Barack Obama,” but “Barack Obama, former president.”
“Associate Dean Michelle Obama,” but “Michelle Obama, associate dean of student services.”
“Excuse me, Dean Obama?” (Only likely to appear in dialogue in writing.)
Here comes the complicating factor: When the person’s title includes a department’s, organization’s, or institution’s name, that should be capitalized although the title is not. For instance:
“Michelle Obama was associate dean of student services.”—“Student services” i lowercased because is a function, not a department or institution.
“Dr. John Smith is associate professor of radiology at Harvard University School of Medicine.”—“Radiology” is lowercase here because it describes the subject in which Smith is a professor, not the department.
“Associate Professor John Smith teaches in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Harvard University School of Medicine.”—“Department of Radiation Oncology” is capitalized here as the name of a department.
Personally, I always refer to Mrs. Obama as “Grammy Award–winner Michelle Obama” but your mileage may vary.
Finally, last words on the subject of capitalization, whether you’re dealing with a title or just plain old body text, here are a few more trips and tricks to capitalize correctly:
Proper nouns (formal names for people, places, things, concepts) are always capitalized.
So are words that come from those proper nouns, eg, “Chilean sea bass” (from Chile) or “Cheddar cheese” (from the from the English village of Cheddar in Somerset).
The titles of your family members are lowercased when talking about them in relation to you (eg, “I told my mom I’d call her.”) but capitalized when used in place of their name (eg, “I told Mom I’d call her.”)
Trade names are always capitalized. You probably knew about Kleenex and Xerox but did you know about Dumpster? (Generic term is “wheelie bin.”) Velcro? (Generic is “hook and loop fastener.”) How about Popsicle? (Generic is “ice pop.”)
Pronouns that refer to a religious god (eg, the Judeo-Christian God or Allah) should be capitalized as He, Him, His (“We believe He sent His only son,” “Let us praise Him”).
Yes, God has pronouns. Deal with it.
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