5 Tips and Tricks: Capitalization

• Show some (dis)respect: capitalizing official titles
Talk about disrespectful! Or maybe where an individual’s official title is concerned, writers show too much respect. There are two easy rules to follow

• Capitalize nouns of direct address 
Sometime, words can serve as both proper and common nouns. One place this gets tricky is when using common nouns that refer to people, such as mom, dad, mama, pops, grandma and grandpa.

• Product names: To capitalize or not to capitalize?
Whenever using a trademarked names, you will need to capitalize it. Among the common ones that writers tend not to capitalize are Styrofoam, Xerox and Kleenix.

• Give, don’t capitalize, (names of) flowers 
In the Age of the Internet when specialists write about their specific fields for common consumption, conflicting grammar rules often appear online. This occurs because the style used when writing for journals or academia in a profession often differs from the standard that the language follows in everyday writing. One such instance is in the field of botany, where flower and other plant names are capitalized.

• Avoid using ALL CAPS in your writing  
When trying to show that a character is speaking louder than before or to emphasize a point, writers sometimes capitalize each letter of a word, creating what is typographically known as ALL CAPS. The writer may want to reconsider capitalizing all of those letters, however.