Responses to Questions About Capitalization

Responses to Questions About Capitalization Responses to Questions About Capitalization Responses to Questions About Capitalization By Mark Nichol Here are three questions I received recently from Daily Writing Tips readers concerning capitalization, along with my replies. 1. I was taught that president is always capitalized when referring to the US President. A few publications uppercase president even in isolation when it refers to the US leader (â€Å"The President will discuss the issue during his speech†), but most commonly it is capitalized only as a title before the name of anyone designated a president (â€Å"President John Smith will discuss the issue with the college faculty†). I’m not aware of any writing or editing resources, other than style guides for these outlier publications, that call for capitalization in all cases. This â€Å"rule† may have been passed on to you by someone who misunderstands the prevailing style precept or adheres to the style of a publication that treats president as an exception to normal capitalization rules. (Teachers, parents, and others, when they teach such â€Å"facts,† are not necessarily reliable.) 2. In the sentence â€Å"We went to our Grandpa John’s house,† is â€Å"Grandpa John† correct, or should grandpa be lowercased? There’s a fine line in such usage, one I learned only after I had been in publishing for many years: If you use a term of family relationship before a first or last name with no preceding pronoun (â€Å"I got a call from Grandpa John†), it’s considered a title (as, for example, in â€Å"Judge Smith† or â€Å"Captain Jones†), so capitalize grandpa. But if you precede the term with a pronoun, as in your example, grandpa becomes merely a descriptive term, one akin to friend (â€Å"my friend Mike†), for example, or neighbor (â€Å"their neighbor Jane†). So, in your example, because of the preceding our, â€Å"grandpa John† is correct. 3. Why is Jewish capitalized, when black isn’t? Some publications capitalize black when referring to ethnicity (and treat white and other skin-color labels the same way), but because such designations encompass a nebulous category, most style black and similar terms lowercase. Jewish, on the other hand, though it also refers to a diverse population, denotes those whose culture (and religion) derives from a more specific origin. (See this post and some of its comments, which point out the inadequacy and inaccuracy of such labels.) Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Style category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:How to Format a UK Business Letter7 Patterns of Sentence StructureEbook, eBook, ebook or e-book?