Some of the first rules you learned in school were about when to capitalize a letter. You probably know the basic rules: Capitalize the word “I” (the pronoun referring to yourself); capitalize the first letter of every sentence (The dog howled); and capitalize initials or acronyms (CBS, for example). However, like everything else in the English language, some rules are more clear-cut than others. Some of the most common questions deal with the following rules:

• When do I use a capital “D” with “dad”? Is it always, sometimes, or never?


• Is it ever proper to capitalize the “S” in “south”?


• Which words should be capitalized in a title?


• When do I capitalize historic events such as wars?

A general rule of thumb is to capitalize specific names of people, places, things, or events, but do not capitalize general labels for people, places, things, or events.

So, the answers to the questions above are as follows:

• Capitalize the name of a family member when it is used in place of the given name. (For example, “Will Dad buy me a new baseball glove?”) Also, capitalize the title if it is used with a name (Aunt Susan is correct). However, you would not capitalize it in “My dad is great at baseball.” If a pronoun comes before the noun, don’t capitalize it.




Source: I’ve been looking for you everywhere,
Tim Green aka atoach, Flickr

• Capitalize the first letter of a directional word if it appears in the name of a specific place (e.g., North Carolina, South Africa). Capitalize the first letter if it refers to a specific region of the country (e.g., In the South, we drink lots of iced tea.) Do not capitalize these words if you are simply indicating a direction (e.g., Turn south at the corner ).


• In a title, the first word should always be capitalized. However, do not capitalize any preposition (e.g., over, in, at) or article (e.g., a, an, the) unless it is the first word of the title (Of Mice and Men, for example, or A Wrinkle in Time). Conjunctions such as and, but, for, or and nor are not capitalized either.


• In the case of historical events, the specific vs. general rule again applies. For example, if you are not naming a specific war (e.g., The war seemed to last forever), don’t capitalize “war.” However, if you are naming a specific event (e.g., the Civil War or the Korean War), “War” and other major words in the name are capitalized.

Keeping these examples in mind, do the following exercise. Determine whether or not a capital letter is needed. Make your choice from each drop-down menu.

To capitalize or not to capitalize, that is the question. Remember that when you are using editing strategies, it’s OK to look words up in a dictionary to make sure you have spelled them correctly. Each time you do, try to devise a handy mnemonic to remember whether or not a word is capitalized.