A Capital Idea

As I have been asked so many times, today I thought we would look at when to use capital letters when writing in English. The correct use of capitals is important in any formal writing, so let’s try and demystify their use!

Every sentence must start with a capital letter. This is an always rule and there are no exceptions. Also if you writing a direct quote from someone the speech should start with a capital. Let me show you an example to explain; Jane asked “Will it rain today?”  As you can see the first word of Jane’s sentence also starts with a capital.  Another always, always rule is the capitalisation of the pronoun “I”, such as in the phrase; where shall I sit?

Remember to use capitals when you are writing proper names. These are the name of people, places, institutions or individual events, such as William Shakespeare, Winter Olympics and New York.  This is also the case when using abbreviations, where the first letter of the abbreviated words should be capitalised. Confused? Let me show you a couple of examples. The British Broadcasting Corporation is most commonly known as the BBC, whilst the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is often referred to as NATO. Words that identify nationality or ethnic groups should also start with a capital, such as Bulgarians, Serbs and English.   

Here is one that might catch you out! The names of the days of the week and the months of the year are written with a capital letter; however the names of the seasons are not.  Therefore, it is correct to write that your birthday falls on the second Wednesday of May. However, you would write that you have a summer birthday.

Remember to capitalise the names of languages such as English and French. This often causes confusion as the title of other school subjects should not be capitalised. In this way you may write that you enjoy maths, science and French.

The names of festivals, holy days and many religious terms are also capitalised. So we might write that Christians are preparing for Christmas, or that during Ramadan Muslims may not eat before sundown. As a general rule the names of religions, their followers and sacred books connected to the religion should start with a capital letter.

When looking at the titles or names of books, films, plays, poems, newspapers and magazines it is correct to capitalise the first letter of every significant word, but not the connecting words. In this way if we were writing about the great novel written by Margaret Mitchell and published in 1936, it would be correct to write “Gone with the Wind”.

Lastly, let’s think about Roman numerals. Generally, when we see them written in text we would expect to see them capitalised. However, this is one major exception to this – look at any book and you will discover that Roman numerals are often used to number pages – but these will be in lower case.  Just something to leave you wondering about!                             

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