Capital letters
Image: Pixabay (public domain)
Determining when to use a capital letter would seem to be one of the more straightforward grammatical choices. And so it is when you are dealing with proper names or words at the beginning of sentences. It’s pretty obvious to most of us that names of countries, cities, days of the week and specific individuals take a capital letter.
But did you know that a reference to the current Australian prime minister should be capitalised, but that references to previous incumbents should not? So, we would have Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, but former prime minister John Howard. While this is the rule according to the Australian Government Style manual (using sentence case for their title rather than maximal capitalisation – I don’t like it, but there you go), you’ll find many other variations, even from one newspaper to the next. Depending whether you’re reading The Age or The Australian, for example, you can often find the same term capitalised differently.
Many of the rules for capitalisation might seem arbitrary and inconsistent. If you come across a piece of writing from the 18th century you’ll probably notice a wealth of capital letters littering the text. This is because many writers used capitals letters to commence all nouns. It can be extremely distracting to fight your Way through a Forest of capital Letters that festoon almost every Line!
These days, the style is for minimal capitalisation, but there’s still plenty of holdover from the good old days of Maximal Capitalisation. I think there is a strong psychological basis for this: people are concerned that the most important points in their writing should not be missed, so they MAKE THE LETTERS BIGGER. Of course, if you really want to make your points forcefully, you’ll find much greater success if you concentrate on bolstering the strength of your argument rather than the size of your font.
There are many exceptions and variations in capitalisation that can often boil down to matters of opinion or convention. If you have a style guide, follow it. Otherwise, the standard rule says, ‘Use a capital for the specific and a small letter for the general.’
So, ‘There was a debate in the Commonwealth Parliament’; but, ‘There was a debate in the parliament’.
