Working with words is a dangerous business. I don’t mean working with words in the sense of writing amateur essays or poetry or the like (though that can be fun). I mean working with words in the sense of a 9-to-5 job, where words are business. If you’re a natural linguistic nitpicker (like me) a job working with words will probably only amplify that shameful part of your personality.
You find yourself internalizing house style standards and applying them to everything you see. Every publication (or publishing house) worthy of the name has some sort of house style guide. Some of these might be extremely long. Some houses might follow Chicago to the letter. Others might be shorter and less formal. But even blogs (the professional ones, anyway), have made choices concerning fonts, line breaks, jump breaks, spacing, margins, and other basic formatting. They do it because they want their readers (who are, after all, customers) to know what aesthetic to expect when they visit their site. It’s like McDonald’s.
Working within a defined style standard for a long time trains your eye to catch minor discrepancies as though they were nickel-sized blotches of ink spilled on the page. I can now tell the difference between an en dash and an em dash faster than most people can tell the difference between a Great Dane and a Shih Tzu. I know where each respective dash is supposed to be used, and when I see one in the wrong place I find it—well, appalling. Conventions for line breaks, closing up, and ampersands I’ve taken to heart as well.
But the rule I’ve internalized more than any other is one for capitalization. A convention within the niche I work in (technical publishing) is to list all titles of papers in sentence case (e.g. “A compact hyperspectral imaging spectrometer for spaceborne . . .”), with only the first letter capitalized. When I was introduced to this style standard, I thought it looked odd. I had spent my entire academic life writing papers with titles like “Regressive Transcendence and Subversion: An Analysis of Postantimodernism in the Novels of . . .” where you gave a cap to pretty much everything other than a preposition or an article.
Taking a title down to sentence case seemed almost like a deliberate humiliation to the author. “Your paper’s title is no longer a capital-t Title, it is simply a sentence that happens to be on the top line.” It felt like we were intentionally announcing to the world that these papers were not important enough to warrant capital letters.
It wasn’t until I had been employing this standard for a while that I realized that this demotion is, in a sense, the point. We apply this standard to proceedings papers, which are just reflections of presentations given at conferences. They aren’t peer-reviewed, and they don’t make or break careers. They’re typically a snapshot of work in progress. The idea behind them is that of sharing information. From that perspective—sharing—a title in sentence case makes sense. You’re just saying, “Hey, this is what my team and I did—see if you find it interesting.” You’re not trying to impress anyone with a big show.
The standard works. It makes the papers appear less pompous. If you care to see how fully I’ve internalized this style, just take a look at the title of every post on this blog. If I gave these blog posts title-case titles, each one would become “a piece,” as in, “That piece I wrote on x.” And I don’t consider a single one of them to be that. They are, at best, snapshots of ideas in progress.
Some writing—the long stuff, the very thorough stuff, the painstakingly crafted stuff—does deserve a title in caps. But much doesn’t, and it’s actually better to admit it. Take a look at The Economist. They use sentence-case titles (though they cap the first word after a colon, which I dislike). Now take a look at Time, capped up to the gills. Which of the two looks smarter?
Lately I’ve noticed odd capitalization all over the place. I got thinking about this from something I saw in the dentist’s office today. They had on the wall a wooden placard in the foofy, curlicue style of those “Home is Where the Heart Is” things your mom or grandma probably has in the kitchen. It read thus:
We Always
Make room for your
Friends
and Referrals
I won’t even bother commenting on the extremely strange choice of line breaks (though you could probably write an essay on that, too). I’ll confine myself to the capitalization. The first baffler is the inconsistency. Why are “room” and “your” lower-case in a sea of caps? But that almost seems like a typographical mistake.
Let’s say they were capped like the rest. It would still be an odd thing to read: “We Always Make Room for Your Friends and Referrals.” I hope it’s oddness is especially apparent when written in-line without special breaks. The oddness is that it’s a damn sentence! It’s not a title or non-sentence phrase like “Home Sweet Home.” It’s a diagrammable, textbook sentence with subject, predicate, preposition, and objects of preposition. So why the caps? Make it sentence-case and give it a period. It would look like an actual statement.
Just below this in the rack was a magazine called Trailer Life (god only knows what is found in those pages or who the hell bothers to find it). They listed a feature on the top line of the cover: “Improve Truck Handling With One Simple Add-On.” Man, they even capped the prepositions in this one, and yet this too is precisely a sentence—of the imperative variety, with the implied subject and modal verb of “you can” or “you shall” (the latter being definitely the funnier).
So what’s with the loud caps? Is this a “piece” that trailer enthusiasts are going to cherish for its wisdom and pass on to friends and family? Or is it just some mildly informative throwaway content that readers will forget as soon as it’s no longer useful to them? Turn it into the sentence that it is. Give it no more than its due. Stop yelling at us with titles too big for their britches.
Anyway, my hypercritical perspective.
