Capitalization Rules

Capitalization Rules

By: Constanza Guerrero

1. Capitalize the first word of every sentence

• Example:

Here is the thing about Gov. Sarah Palin: She loves America. Really loves it. She loves the smell of cut grass and hay, as she told Ohio voters Sunday. She loves Navy bases, she said in Virginia Beach on Monday morning. She loves America’s “most beautiful national anthem,” she told a crowd here a few hours later.

2. Capitalize the first word of a quotation.

• Example:

“I think she’s looking like Christie Brinkley going to court,” said Betsey Johnson, the fashion designer and a longtime proponent of tutus, fingerless lace gloves and party dresses, what could once have been described as a Madonna signature. “She looks pretty straight now, right?”

3. Capitalize names of people, including initials and titles of adress.

• Example:

Ms. Charnin Morrison (who cut her hair like Madonna’s when the “Rain” video was released in 1993) said she likes the shorts and suspects they are from a sport division of Ms. McCartney or Prada.

4. Capitalize family words if used alone or followed by a name.

• Example: Give it to me straight: Are Grandma and Grandpa

bad for the environment?

This is a lovely film about dying, but we need to know more. I want to care about these people, I did care about Mom. She was heroic and loving and just the mom you want and want to be.

5. Don’t capitalize family words if used with a possesive pronoun or article

• Example:

Rodriguez’s wife, Cynthia, filed for divorce in Miami, contending that she could not tolerate her husband’s extramarital affairs and other marital misconduct.

. “Alex has emotionally abandoned his wife

and children and has left her with no choice but to divorce him,” said the papers, filed in Miami Dade County.

6. Capitalize the pronoun “I”.

• Example:

“Man, I love small-town U.S.A.,” Ms. Palin told several thousand people on a field in Ohio, “and I don’t care what anyone else says about small-town U.S.A. You guys, you just get it.”

7. Capitalize names of God.

• Example:

As you can imagine, a Catholic newspaper often has occasion to refer to God, which would appear to pose no problem in three of those languages. In Malay, however, it has long been the practice for Christians to use the same name for the deity that Muslims do: Allah.

8. Capitalize the names of nationalities, races, peoples and religions.

• Example: Malaysia’s population is mostly Malay and mostly

Muslim, but the country has sizable (and somewhat overlapping) ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities, including about 900,000 Catholics (4 percent of the total population). Tensions and resentments between Malays and other groups — usually the country’s ethnic Chinese, who play a large role in its economy — have been a dominant theme in its politics.

9. Generally, don’t capitalize occupations.

• Example:

Mr. Ginsberg, the chief outside counsel to the Bush-Cheney re-election effort, agreed to an interview after several telephone calls to him and the campaign's asking that he explain his role. He said that he was helping the group comply with campaign finance rules and that his work was entirely separate from his work for the president.

10. Capitalize the names of countries, states, provinces and cities.

• Example:

Puerto Montt, Chile— Looking out over the low green mountains jutting through miles of placid waterways here in southern Chile, it is hard to imagine that anything could be amiss.

11. Capitalize the name of oceans, rivers, lakes, islands and mountains.

• Example:

Dark and forbidding stretch the waters of Loch Ness, the strange lake that cuts deep through the mountains of Scotland. Some 3,000 witnesses have testified to seeing the furtive monster that lives there.

The earthquake that struck northwest of Sumatra, Indonesia, at dawn yesterday was a perfect wave-making machine, and the lack of a tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean essentially guaranteed the devastation that swept coastal communities around southern Asia, experts said.

Is it possible to get to Easter Island without traveling a very long distance? No; it is not. If you live in New York City you will fly to Santiago, Chile— 11½ hours — rest a day, and then take another jet plane 5 hours into the Pacific to reach your goal.

Johnson and Lamb were Londoners to the backbone, in spirit and in fact and preferred their natural river Thamesis to all the streams and seas of the actual or the ideal world.

12. Capitalize the names of geographical areas.

• Example:

• SEATTLE — West Coast ports were shut down on Thursday as thousands of longshoremen failed to report for work, part of what their union leaders said was a one-day, one-shift protest against the war in Iraq.

There is something magnetic about the North Pole, and it is not the force that tugs compass needles.

The Caribbean in summer? It’s a more appealing option than you might think, especially if you’re looking for a bargain vacation this year.

13. Don’t capitalize directions if they aren’t names of geographical areas.

• Example:

The tens of thousands of German immigrants who poured through the Port of Galveston and across south-central Texas in the mid-19th century brought with them formidable appetites not only for hard work but also for good food and drink.

14. Capitalize names of schools, parks, buildings and streets.

• Example:

The Vatican has long been riven by this tension between dogma and the outside world. Yet it could apply to any religion: it’s hard to rejigger the rules when truth is meant to be fixed forever.

The American Planning Association on Wednesday announced that it had designated Central Park as one of the 10 great public spaces in the United States.

Lawrence H. Summers, the embattled president of Harvard University, announced yesterday that the university would spend at least $50 million over the next decade to recruit, support and promote women and members of underrepresented minority groups on its faculty.

15. Capitalize names of days and months.

• Example:

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama debated for 90 minutes on Tuesday night before a nation in economic crisis, each promising anxious Americans that he had the better plan and vision to lead the country through what both men said was the most dire financial situation since the Great Depression.

The McCain campaign, in its best fund-raising month ever, took in $27 million in July. This was the fifth month in a row that Mr. McCain’s donations exceed those of the previous month.

16. Capitalize names of Holidays and Historical events.

Example: In Prof. Sloane's volume we have to announce the

publication of a very substantial and original contribution to our knowledge of what has been hitherto a very vague and unfamiliar phase of the French Revolution. The richness of the material accessible to the student of this point in the ecclesiastical history of France is only equaled by the scarcity of any comprehensive or satisfactory sifting and summing up of this vast quantity of unconnected facts.

To people of imperfect sympathies, going to hear the Rev. Mr. KALLOCH preach on Thanks-giving Day may not appear the jolliest possible way of keeping the great New-England festival. But tastes differ; and for myself I could not conscientiously have said that my name was McGregor, not withstanding my feet were on my native heather, if I had neglected the custom of my Puritan progenitors and not gone to meeting before eating my roast turkey.

17. Don’t capitalize names of seasons.

• Example:

But as we hunker down for the long haul, it’s easy to forget that those symbols of spring — you remember them vaguely: flowers, plants — live through even the coldest seasons in the city’s botanical gardens.

A good source of information on St. Petersburg, the former Russian capital, for the rest of your stay is the Travel section article by Steve Dougherty “Holiday on Ice With a Shot of Vodka on the Side” (Dec. 31, 2006), about spending the winter in St. Petersburg.

18. Capitalize the first word and all important words of titles of books,

magazines, newspapers and articles.

• Example:

In the Colombia section, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez sits next to Piers Paul Read’s “Alive,” about the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes.

Rolling Stone magazine will report in the issue now going to press that some 400 American journalists, including correspondents for The New York Times, CBS News and a dozen other organizations, secretly shared information with and in some cases provided operational assistance to the Central Intelligence Agency over the last 25 years.

19. Capitalize the first word and all important words of names of movies, plays, radio programs and television

programs.

• Example:

Leonardo DiCaprio -- the few who know him and the many who pretend to know him call him Leo -- is not only Hollywood's hottest star as a result of ''Titanic'' and ''The Man in the Iron Mask'' but, by all accounts, the biggest star to have emerged in years.

20. Don’t capitalize articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (but, and, or), and short

prepositions (of, with, in, on, for) unless they are the first word of a title.

• Example: "An Inconvenient Truth," Davis Guggenheim's

new documentary about the dangers of climate change, is a film that should never have been made.

21. Capitalize the names of organizations, government groups, and

businesses.

• Example:

The 15-nation Council, which was deeply divided over the war, will consider a report from Secretary General Kofi Annan on what role the United Nations can play in Baghdad.

Though American Airlines has been flying around the globe with the exception of the China-Australia gap, according to a summary of its wartime services for the Air Transport Command and Naval Air Transport Service made public yesterday by A.N. Kemp, American Airlines presilent, the company is asking for peacetime operation only across the North Atlantic.

The justice system in West Virginia is broken and the United States Supreme Court should take steps to fix it, according to a pile of briefs in three cases awaiting the court’s attention.

22. Capitalize trade names, but don’t capitalize the name of the product.

• Example:

Staff members of the laptop project were concerned that American children might try the pared-down machines and find them lacking compared to their Apple, Hewlett-Packard or Dell laptops.

Will an unusual ad for Absolut vodka carry the headline ''How much is that bottle in the window?'‘.

I own a Prada messenger bag, I have two Kate Spades, a Gucci belt and a Prada belt, and several pairs of Sisley jeans. I have a lot of Clinique makeup, Bobbi Brown eyeliner, MAC lip gloss and Angel perfume -- that's by Thierry Mugler.'‘

23. Capitalize the names of languages.

• Example:

Most of my Latino students are fluent speakers of both Spanish and English; and not just on the playground. They switch back and forth quickly between languages.

Paul and Denise Gamble have never been to China, and they were never particularly interested in its language or culture. Yet their two school-age children attend Shuang Wen Academy, a public school on the Lower East Side where much of the day is spent learning Mandarin.

24. Don’t capitalize school subjects unless they are the names of languages

or are followed by a number.

• Example: The survey, by the Center on Education Policy,

found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math.

The math test will cover Algebra II, the third year of most high school math sequences. The format of the math questions will also change, eliminating quantitative-comparison questions, which ask students to assess two mathematical equations or statement and say which amount is larger.