Capitalisation Rules - learn how and when to use capital letters.

This lecture is on capitalisation rules.

Capitalisation rules for nouns.

These can be divided into two main categories.

The standard rules and all other places where capitals are used

Standard capitalisation rules for nouns.

The start of a sentence to The first word in a sentence is always uppercase.

and The only real exception to this is brand names that start with a lower case.

For example, eBay or iPhone.

And if it bothers you starting a sentence with the lowercase letter, the advice I can give you is to restructure your sentence so that this brand name is not the first word in the sentence.

So you can either put it saying the passive form, so instead of saying iPhones are expensive, you can say, expensive phones include iPhones - that type of thing.

And all proper nouns are uppercase.

Tom, Jupiter, Wall Street.

Buckingham Palace.

Tuesday, June, New York.

These are all just examples.

Please refer to the lecture on common and proper nouns for more details.

And the first person pronoun I is always uppercase.

It doesn’t matter where it appears in the sentence, it is always uppercase.

No exception.

There are other places where nouns are capitalised.

For instance, in letters and emails, in poetry, in titles and headings.

We look now at letters and emails.

A letter or email generally starts like this.

Dear Miss Brown - comma or not comma - many thanks for your letter.

Now the M in many is upper case even though it doesn’t look like it’s the start of a sentence.

This is just a convention that is used.

For informal mails or letters, you would say Hi Bob,

Did you also have a great time yesterday?

And again the did starts with a capital letter by convention, even though it looks like it’s not the start of a sentence.

In poetry, especially traditional poetry, each line starts with a capital letter, irrespective of how the previous line was punctuated.

So here’s a classic example of a Valentine’s poem.

Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you.

And you’ll see there’s only really one full stop, so it’s one sentence, but because it’s in a traditional poetry format, each line starts with an uppercase.

Now in modern poetry, this convention is not always held.

For those of you who like alternative versions of these poems, here’s a couple for you.

My favorite one is this last one.

Roses are red, violets are blue, some poems rhyme, but this one doesn’t.

Also in poetry and literature, the letter O is often capitalised as it’s used as a form of address.

So for example, in the Odyssey, Tell me O muse of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide.

Capitals in titles and headings.

There are several options for titles and headings.

You can capitalise the first word only.

So here it says titles and headings.

Only titles has a capital.

You can capitalise every word.

So Titles And Headings.

Each word has a capital letter.

Or you can capitalise the significant words as in this example.

Titles and Headings.

So titles, headings have capital letters - a little words like and, or, on, it - they would be left lowercase.

The important thing is is to be consistent.

So if you’re doing a group of headings, make sure you use the same format and it doesn’t really matter which one.

I personally prefer the significant words.

And that’s what you generally see here, but again, don’t mix and match randomly.

Keep it consistent within a document.