A Capital idea!
Mar. 26th, 2004 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynThank you to all the folks who are sending me White Fawn vibes! I’m still a ball of nerves and was awake most of the night thinking about it, hoping I’ll at least do well enough on the test part to merit an interview, but until it actually happens, I’m going to be a wreck.
Which means I can’t totally concentrate on usage misunderstandings, so forgive me if this wobbles all over the place. Anyway, today I thought I’d tackle something that is closely related to punctuation in some respects, but that seems to confuse new writers more than it ought to -- capitalization. Or Capitalization.
One of the most reliable resources for finding out whether a word needs capping or not is a dictionary, but oddly, few people ever use this resource, and instead blindly stumble along, randomly capitalizing words because they don’t know better. A lot of people don’t even know they’re doing this, or care, which makes it harder for us as readers -- think of all the stories you’ve read in your fandom where the characters' titles, their jobs, their body parts, items in their apartments, are all capitalized for no reason. Random capping can be a real quality killer -- even writers who make the effort to get everything else correct can turn off readers if they show that they haven’t bothered to check that common nouns aren’t usually capitalized.
In a language such as German, common nouns are frequently capitalized. But in English, we cap only proper nouns, really (and words derived from proper nouns). What’s the diff? A proper noun is the name of specific persons, places, and things (a character in your fic, the city they live in, the place they work, and the name of their gun, as example). Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference gives this great little list of things to cap:
Whew! That’s a pretty big list, but if you look carefully, you’ll notice that all of these items share a kind of similarity. Regular everyday items like table, stake, tape, car, computer... none of those are included on this list. So you can see that the common, everyday words you use in your stories probably won’t be capitalized. If you were talking about brand names, then you’d use a capped name, but not for the common noun. Buffy would wield a stake; but if she bought a brand-name version, it would be the Kill-O-Matic stake.
And obviously acronyms and initialisms will be capped, but only sometimes will their common noun versions (the spelled out words) be capped: digital video disc becomes DVD, but the United States Marine Corps is abbreviated as USMC; video cassette recorder is VCR, but Federal Bureau of Investigation is FBI. This is why I made the statement about the dictionary -- so few people ever turn to a really good dictionary to look up a word to see if it’s treated with caps or not, yet a surprising amount of answers are right there. If you were wondering if Faith saying her motel room is Spartan should be written in upper or lower case S, looking it up in the dictionary will solve your problem right there -- it’s capped. And a quick check of a web site can also solve your problem sometimes with company names or organization names -- there’s a plethora of information out there, yet few people are willing to look it up.
I’m never sure why so many people come out of high school English with the weird idea that common nouns are capped, but I think most of us have encountered this misapprehension over and over in fanfic. I personally recommend something my fellow editors might find heretical -- to me, it’s safer for an amateur writer to lower case a noun, even a proper noun, than to pepper their prose with random capitalizations because they’re not familiar with how to do it. I’d rather see a version of this sentence that’s undercapped (for instance, not using a cap on Mom or on Magic Box), than one that would cap words like stake, cemetery, you, and vampire: “Dawn, would you tell Mom that I’m going to The Magic Box to pick up a new stake, and then Giles and I will head to the cemetery to kill vampires.” In an ideal world, of course, everyone would do that correctly, but it rarely happens, so I’ll take the undercapping over Every other Word Capitalized, thank You.
I think the tendency is often to cap things in order to lend them some importance. This is especially prevalent in the Buffy world, because I’ve noticed that nearly everyone capitalizes Slayer when used descriptively (I don’t unless I’m using it for an effect) and Vampire. I think there’s a belief that a cap letter adds a certain oomph to the noun, but I’d advise using this cautiously. For instance, someone could probably make a good case for keeping Stargate capped when used generically because it could be construed as a proper nooun, but it’s something I wouldn’t likely do -- I’d be more inclined to say that Daniel jumped through a stargate on planet Whatsit, but that he worked with the Stargate team on interplanetary research. Though that’s just me.
And it gets more confusing when some things that seem relational are capped, but others aren’t -- you cap months, holidays, and days of the week in English, but the seasons and numbers of the days of the month aren’t. So that probably leaves people going WTF? and making wild guesses. With things like Slayer, it gets back to a basic rule in English of capping titles of persons when they’re used as part of a proper name, but not when those words are used alone. So we set up rules that are so confusing, it’s hard for people to remember which rule is which, and folks just throw capital letters around like confetti because it’s easier. For instance, we might say Watcher Rupert Giles, or Principal Snyder, but when those titles are used alone, they’d be lower cased -- “Rupert Giles was Buffy’s watcher, and he and the principal of Sunnydale High School hated each other.”
There are a lot of other rules about capitalization I won’t get into here because I think it’s just too much detail, and it’s not necessarily the source of confusion for most people -- and I’m mostly interested in exploding myths and un-confusing people. For instance, you cap the first, last and all major words in titles and subtitles of works such as books, articles, and songs; you capitalize the first words in a sentence; you cap the first word of a quoted sentence unless it’s blended into the sentence that introduces it (Stuart told Vince that he could never “have a normal relationship because you're too much of a fanboy for even the most tolerant lover.” but Stuart said, “You’ll never have a normal relationship because you’re too much of a fanboy for even the most tolerant lover.”)
But most of that’s kind of basic knowledge that I think is less important than understanding one simple rule: Don’t cap common nouns. If enough people followed this rule, think of how easy our fanfic reading experience would be! Our Eyes won’t be Leaping around, trying To follow Random Capitlizing of all the Words in a Given Sentence.
Which means I can’t totally concentrate on usage misunderstandings, so forgive me if this wobbles all over the place. Anyway, today I thought I’d tackle something that is closely related to punctuation in some respects, but that seems to confuse new writers more than it ought to -- capitalization. Or Capitalization.
One of the most reliable resources for finding out whether a word needs capping or not is a dictionary, but oddly, few people ever use this resource, and instead blindly stumble along, randomly capitalizing words because they don’t know better. A lot of people don’t even know they’re doing this, or care, which makes it harder for us as readers -- think of all the stories you’ve read in your fandom where the characters' titles, their jobs, their body parts, items in their apartments, are all capitalized for no reason. Random capping can be a real quality killer -- even writers who make the effort to get everything else correct can turn off readers if they show that they haven’t bothered to check that common nouns aren’t usually capitalized.
In a language such as German, common nouns are frequently capitalized. But in English, we cap only proper nouns, really (and words derived from proper nouns). What’s the diff? A proper noun is the name of specific persons, places, and things (a character in your fic, the city they live in, the place they work, and the name of their gun, as example). Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference gives this great little list of things to cap:
Names for the deity, religions, religious followers, sacred books; words of family relationships used as names; particular places; nationalities and their languages, races, tribes; education institutions, departments, degrees, particular courses; government departments, organizations, political parties; and historical movements, periods, events, and documents.
Whew! That’s a pretty big list, but if you look carefully, you’ll notice that all of these items share a kind of similarity. Regular everyday items like table, stake, tape, car, computer... none of those are included on this list. So you can see that the common, everyday words you use in your stories probably won’t be capitalized. If you were talking about brand names, then you’d use a capped name, but not for the common noun. Buffy would wield a stake; but if she bought a brand-name version, it would be the Kill-O-Matic stake.
And obviously acronyms and initialisms will be capped, but only sometimes will their common noun versions (the spelled out words) be capped: digital video disc becomes DVD, but the United States Marine Corps is abbreviated as USMC; video cassette recorder is VCR, but Federal Bureau of Investigation is FBI. This is why I made the statement about the dictionary -- so few people ever turn to a really good dictionary to look up a word to see if it’s treated with caps or not, yet a surprising amount of answers are right there. If you were wondering if Faith saying her motel room is Spartan should be written in upper or lower case S, looking it up in the dictionary will solve your problem right there -- it’s capped. And a quick check of a web site can also solve your problem sometimes with company names or organization names -- there’s a plethora of information out there, yet few people are willing to look it up.
I’m never sure why so many people come out of high school English with the weird idea that common nouns are capped, but I think most of us have encountered this misapprehension over and over in fanfic. I personally recommend something my fellow editors might find heretical -- to me, it’s safer for an amateur writer to lower case a noun, even a proper noun, than to pepper their prose with random capitalizations because they’re not familiar with how to do it. I’d rather see a version of this sentence that’s undercapped (for instance, not using a cap on Mom or on Magic Box), than one that would cap words like stake, cemetery, you, and vampire: “Dawn, would you tell Mom that I’m going to The Magic Box to pick up a new stake, and then Giles and I will head to the cemetery to kill vampires.” In an ideal world, of course, everyone would do that correctly, but it rarely happens, so I’ll take the undercapping over Every other Word Capitalized, thank You.
I think the tendency is often to cap things in order to lend them some importance. This is especially prevalent in the Buffy world, because I’ve noticed that nearly everyone capitalizes Slayer when used descriptively (I don’t unless I’m using it for an effect) and Vampire. I think there’s a belief that a cap letter adds a certain oomph to the noun, but I’d advise using this cautiously. For instance, someone could probably make a good case for keeping Stargate capped when used generically because it could be construed as a proper nooun, but it’s something I wouldn’t likely do -- I’d be more inclined to say that Daniel jumped through a stargate on planet Whatsit, but that he worked with the Stargate team on interplanetary research. Though that’s just me.
And it gets more confusing when some things that seem relational are capped, but others aren’t -- you cap months, holidays, and days of the week in English, but the seasons and numbers of the days of the month aren’t. So that probably leaves people going WTF? and making wild guesses. With things like Slayer, it gets back to a basic rule in English of capping titles of persons when they’re used as part of a proper name, but not when those words are used alone. So we set up rules that are so confusing, it’s hard for people to remember which rule is which, and folks just throw capital letters around like confetti because it’s easier. For instance, we might say Watcher Rupert Giles, or Principal Snyder, but when those titles are used alone, they’d be lower cased -- “Rupert Giles was Buffy’s watcher, and he and the principal of Sunnydale High School hated each other.”
There are a lot of other rules about capitalization I won’t get into here because I think it’s just too much detail, and it’s not necessarily the source of confusion for most people -- and I’m mostly interested in exploding myths and un-confusing people. For instance, you cap the first, last and all major words in titles and subtitles of works such as books, articles, and songs; you capitalize the first words in a sentence; you cap the first word of a quoted sentence unless it’s blended into the sentence that introduces it (Stuart told Vince that he could never “have a normal relationship because you're too much of a fanboy for even the most tolerant lover.” but Stuart said, “You’ll never have a normal relationship because you’re too much of a fanboy for even the most tolerant lover.”)
But most of that’s kind of basic knowledge that I think is less important than understanding one simple rule: Don’t cap common nouns. If enough people followed this rule, think of how easy our fanfic reading experience would be! Our Eyes won’t be Leaping around, trying To follow Random Capitlizing of all the Words in a Given Sentence.
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-26 12:31 pm (UTC)LOTR is giving me capitalization fits. The book sayeth "elvish minstrels", "the elvish appetite", "elvish song", "fair elvish face", the "elvish arrow" "this is more elvish than anything I ever heard tell of" but "The letters are Elvish", "forged anew by Elvish smiths," and "nearby Elvish voices". It seems that Tolkien generally capitalized for the language, but not for use of "elvish" as an adjective; but I'm still confused by the difference between "elvish minstrels" and "Elvish smiths" or "Elvish voices" What am I missing?
(I'll spare you Elf/elf and Hobbit/hobbit.)
no subject
Date: 2004-03-26 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-26 02:48 pm (UTC)I found that I feel uncomforable reading text where sentences' beginnings and other words that should be capitalized are not. But overcapitalizing feels like screaming.