I have decided to declare war on unnecessary capitalization. It is a disease that is infecting every area of written English, and it needs to be stopped! Well, maybe it's not that bad, but it is irksome. Capital letters should not be used for every noun, unless one is writing a legal document with definitions and such or Trying To Be Understood As If Every Word Is Important.
Writing with unnecessary capital letters seems pretentious. So, some guidelines: don't capitalize unless you have a reason. Proper nouns, such as names and titles, do need capitalization, but the AP guidelines I was taught are fairly simple to follow: don't capitalize a title of a person unless the person's name immediately follows. The only exception to this was the President of the United States. The president of, say, a 4-H club, does not deserve this honor.
Give me some examples, and I'll let you know whether I think they deserve to be capitalized. I may offer my own tomorrow morning.
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2 comments:
I am guilty of using capitalization too much, too. My blog posts have all been capitalized up to this point. But no more! I will endeavor to use capitals only when necessary. Repeat after me...
By the way, when Romanizing (or is that romanizing?) titles of Japanese langauge books, the first letter of the first word is the only word capitalized aside from proper names.
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