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Keep your finger off the caps lock with digital signage
When designing your digital signage content, you need to understand a few rules of grammar, ESPECIALLY capitalization.
September 13, 2019 by Ellyce Kelly — Communications Consultant/Public Relations Special, Visix, Inc.
This is part two of a series looking at common digital signage grammar mistakes. Click here for part one.
There is a strange new trend in written English to capitalize random nouns, and even other words. Writing a word in ALL CAPS can be a form of emphasis (e.g. I want to go TOMORROW), though some online readers still find this to be equivalent to shouting (an alternative is to use asterisks for emphasis, e.g. "I want to go *tomorrow*").
English used to capitalize all nouns (like German still does) until a couple of hundred years ago. Today, common nouns are never capitalized. Never. Even though advertising copy may play with capitalization, the rule is to only capitalize proper nouns and adjectives that come from proper nouns:
- Henri Rousseau.
- a Polish deli.
- a Christmas present.
- the French language.
We still capitalize:
- days of the week.
- months.
- holidays (Easter, Memorial Day).
- brand names.
- company names.
- musical groups (Led Zeppelin, Muse, The Who).
- artistic groups and movements (the Surrealists, Surrealism — note: this is beginning to change).
- institutions and organizations (Harvard University, the United Nations).
- governmental departments (Congress, but "congressional", the Department of Agriculture).
- man-made structures and objects (the Titanic, the Washington Monument).
- streets and roads.
- man-made territories (New York City, Dade County, Oregon).
- landmarks, both natural and man-made (the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Lake Eerie and Mount Shasta).
- collections of islands or mountains (the South Sandwich Islands and the Cascade Mountains).
- planets (but use lower case for "sun" and "moon").
- languages.
- time periods and many events (the Roaring Twenties, World War I, the Middle Ages), but not the names for centuries (the twentieth century).
- races and nationalities (but use lower case for "white").
- religious and deity nouns (the Bible, but biblical; note that this is changing, and many people no longer capitalize the words "heaven", "hell" or "the devil").
- titles when used before a name ("Senator Blake Uffersly will talk at 4pm", but "Blake Uffersly is a senator from Maryland"); sometimes the highest ranks of government, royalty, religion and so on will be capitalized as a sign of respect, so the President, the King, the Pope); titles are not the same as professions (director Martin Scorsese, comedian Bill Burr, chef Kristen Kish, professor Barbara Harbach).
Note that seasonal things (spring, summer, winter solstice, daylight savings time, etc.) are no longer capitalized.
While you need to capitalize in full direct quotations, you don't need to in partial quotations. So, "She said, "I am really too busy to come tomorrow night," but "She said she was "way too busy" to come."
Titles
In the English-speaking world, it has become common practice to only capitalize the first word of a title. So, in the U.K., for example, Agatha Christie's novel would be Evil under the sun.
In the U.S., older formats still apply for titles. Always capitalize the following in titles:
- the first and last word of the title, no matter what they are.
- all adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs (including all forms of "to be").
- all pronouns (including "it" and "these/those/that/this").
- "no", "not" and the interjection "O."
- All proper nouns and names.
Do NOT capitalize (unless they are the first or last word of a title):
- Articles (a, an, the).
- Coordinating conjunctions (and, or, nor, but, for, yet — but capitalize "because").
- The word "to", either with or without an infinitive.
In the U.S., you'd generally see the Agatha Christie novel written as Evil Under the Sun.
There are different house styles and style guides out there, and some disagreement as to how to handle capitalization with other words. Some suggest capitalizing short conjunctions (like as, if, how) and others do not. Prepositions are another problem — the Associated Press Stylebook says you should capitalize prepositions longer than three letters (with, across, about), while other say only capitalize if it's five or more letters.
When in doubt, there's a free handy online tool to help you capitalize titles correctly for U.S. standards: https://capitalizemytitle.com/. You can see your title using APA guidelines, Chicago Manual of Style, AP and MLA. You can also see if you have used capital letters correctly in a sentence using the same tool.
Though it's common these days to simply use italics for all titles, there are actually some older rules that can be used.
Underline or italicize longer works:
- Books.
- Long poems.
- Plays.
- Album titles.
- Periodicals.
- A book series (e.g. The Chronicles of Narnia).
- TV or radio series.
- Longer musical compositions.
- Works of art.
- Video games.
Use quotation marks (" ") for shorter works:
- Short poems.
- Short stories.
- Songs.
- Articles.
- Books contained within a collection (e.g. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe").
- Book chapters.
- Single episodes of a TV or radio series.
Next time, we will look at punctuation.
