Capitalization Style Guide: Rules of Content Writing

Are you confused about the rules of capitalization in headings and sub-headings? It is important to know when to use capitals or non-capitals in Headings and Sub-headings in your content pieces in order to bring consistency in style. This post lays down some rules of thumb when it comes to capitalization.

Among the many rules of content writing, capitalization is often the most misunderstood.

Quite a few content writers use the rules inconsistently, making the style looks disoriented. In order to follow the rules correctly, writers must follow a specific capitalization style guide. For example, it is important to know when to use capitals or non-capitals in Headings and Sub-headings in your content pieces in order to bring consistency in style.

Consistency is one of main objectives of a style guide. However, each publication’s style (online or offline) will vary depending on different factors.

Design and the type of content you produce are two major factors. For example, there are some websites where all lowercase letters in headlines and sub-headlines work perfectly for their content. Their design and subject matter support that style. But that style may not be the best choice for another site’s design and subject matter.

The Rules of Capitalization in Content Writing

  • Some websites such as Copyblogger use a title case, or up style for capitalization in headlines. Whether or not you capitalize a word in a title depends on its part of speech. According to most style guides that use title case, the basic rules are:
  • Capitalize the first and last word in a title, regardless of part of speech.
  • Capitalize all nouns (baby, country, picture), pronouns (you, she, it), verbs (walk, think, dream), adjectives (sweet, large, perfect), adverbs (immediately, quietly), and subordinating conjunctions (as, because, although).
  • Lowercase “to” as part of an infinitive. Lowercase all articles (a, the), prepositions (to, at, in, with, from), and coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or).
  • Capitalize the first letter of the first word on each line of a headline, even if the word is typically lowercase.
  • For our subheads, use sentence case, where only the first letter of the first word is capitalized.
  • No punctuation is used at the end of a subhead.

Of course, each piece of content you produce will be formatted slightly differently and have different components, so occasionally adjustments need to be made and style may be altered to make an article clearer or easier to read.

Single-author Site vs. Multi-author Site

If it is a multi-author site, the articles will have more variety in how they are formatted than a single-author site that adheres to one standard template or a few standard templates.

Single-author sites have a great opportunity to implement consistent style, since the author has complete control of the content he or she produces. It can help make the site look polished and professional.

Online Tool for Capitalization

If you’re looking for an online tool that will help you capitalize your titles automatically, use this tool. It helps when you have a question about should a word in a title be capitalized or not. Just paste in your headline and it does the rest.

Courtesy: LinkedIn

About Susanta Sahoo

I'm the founder and content marketing head at Top League. Our team can help you build great content that helps you rank high on Google and generate high-quality leads. Get in touch with us and let's discuss your project. I'm on LinkedIn & Twitter, just so you know.