Tag Archives: when to use capital letters in writing

Capital!

I always sign Christmas and birthday cards with a capital ‘N’. It makes me feel like Napoleon…

The three main things to check after writing anything are spelling, punctuation and capital letters, so when do you use capitals?

  • For the important words in titles, either of individuals or pieces of writing, eg Chief Inspector of Schools or This Blog Post is Great! Using title case or headline case for a newspaper article can get complicated, but there are two main ways to do it. You can either capitalise every word that has at least three or four letters or use these principles:
    • Capitalise the first and last words.
    • Capitalise adverbs, nouns, pronouns and verbs.
    • Capitalise prepositions if they’re in a phrasal verb, eg Look Out.
    • Capitalize prepositions if they’re in a Latin phrase, eg Ad Lib.
  • For proper nouns, eg Peter, Tuesday and Chelsea.
  • For titles and ‘vocatives’, eg Sir or Mum (but ‘his mum’ not ‘his Mum’ as there are many possible mums)
  • For abbreviations, eg BBC (although acronyms you can actually pronounce only need one at the start, eg Nato, not NATO).
  • For the first word in a sentence, eg This is a sentence.
  • For the first word in direct speech, eg he said, “Hello.”
  • The word “I”.