Complicated Capitalization

May 3 at 10am-10:30 PT

We’ve been taught since elementary school to capitalize proper nouns and titles, but capitalization rules aren’t that simple. The English language includes countless categories with varying rules: epithets, ethnic groups, ability status, geographic regions, cultural periods, academic subjects, brand names, and military terms, to name a few.

We can rely on our knowledge of common usage plus logic, along with trusted resources like Merriam-Webster, but we might still have questions:

How do we capitalize a newspaper headline in fiction? (Use title case, also known as headline style, says The Chicago Manual of Style: “Residents Evacuated as Volcano Erupts.”)

Is it The Jazz Age or the Jazz Age? (In this instance, the article “the” is not capitalized unless it begins the sentence).

Is it German Shepherd or German shepherd? (It’s the latter.)

Is it correct to say, “I saw the Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, in the Northern Hemisphere”? (None of those terms should be capitalized, according to Merriam-Webster.)

Join us May 3, 2025, at 10 a.m. PT, for Crazy Capitalization, a pop-up workshop to demystify capitalization basics. We’ll focus on using capitalization for emphasis; using—or not using—all caps; capitalizing names, places, and titles; and a smattering of unusual capitalization situations.