Section 9.1

Capitalization

Although there are many specialized rules for capitalizing letters, the following four are the most common.

1. Capitalize the first words of sentences, including sentences cited in quotations:

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The QA engineer has been quoted as saying, "The main source of connector failure found in the analysis is seal deformation caused by pressures in excess of 1000 psig."

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2. Capitalize proper names, including any particular person, object, place, project, institution, river, vessel, genus, culture, ethnic group, or formal job title:

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Project Athena	Operation Empty Space
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
the aircraft carrier Kittyhawk	Asian-American
the White Nile	Mars
the University of California at Santa Cruz	Air Force One
Dean for Undergraduate Education	Director of Operations

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3. Unless you are following a documentation style that specifies otherwise, capitalize titles of books, periodicals, published and unpublished reports, articles, and document sections:

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A Handbook of Chemical Processes

Journal of the American Chemical Society

A Report to the President on the Explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger [published report]

"Report of the O-Ring Seal Design Team" [unpublished report]

Benefits of Caloric Restriction [section of an article]

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4. Capitalize references to specific figures, tables, chapters, sections, equations:

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Chapter Two

Equation 36

Figure 10-3

Appendix C

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Rules for Capitalizing Multiple-Word Titles and Proper Names

Unless you are following a documentation style that specifies otherwise, observe the following rules for capitalizing multiple word titles and proper nouns.

• Capitalize all nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions.
• Capitalize any word, regardless of the part of speech, if it is the first or last word of the title or subtitle or a proper name or if it follows a punctuation mark indicating a break in the title.
• Do not capitalize articles, coordinating conjunctions, prepositions, and the word to in infinitives unless they appear as the first or last word of a title or subtitle.

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The Making of the Atomic Bomb

"Learning to Write Compact C++ Code"

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General Guidelines for Capitalizing Scientific Terms

Each discipline has its own specific conventions for determining which terms should be capitalized. In general, scientific writing tends to minimize capitalized nouns. The following list summarizes some widely observed practices.

• Capitalize and put in italics the phylum, class, order, family, and genus of plants and animals. Do not capitalize the species.

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Homo sapiens

Esox lucius

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• Capitalize the names of geological eras, periods, epochs, and series but do not capitalize the word indicating the amount of time:

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Jurassic period

Cenozoic era

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• Capitalize astronomical terms such as the names of galaxies, constellations, stars, planets and their satellites, and asteroids. However, the terms earth, sun, and moon are often not capitalized unless they appear in a sentence that refers to other astronomical bodies.

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The sun is an ordinary star.

Venus and Earth differ significantly in the composition of their atmospheres.

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• Do not capitalize medical terms except for any part of a term consisting of a proper noun:

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infectious mononucleosis

brachial plexus

Parkinson's disease

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• Do not capitalize physical laws, theorems, principles, or constants except for attached proper names:

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special theory of relativity

Boyle's law

the third law of thermodynamics

Avogadro's number

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## Capitalization ##


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