New Chicago Rules – Capitalization

A month ago I went over some of the punctuation rule changes listed in the latest edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, the preferred guide for fiction and for much commercial non-fiction.

There are some notable capitalization changes too.

1. Rather than capitalizing “web” Chicago now prefers the use of the lowercase for web, website, web page, and so on. However, World Wide Web is still capitalized, as is Internet.

2. Southern California has long been recognized as a particular region, requiring a capital S. In this new edition of Chicago, Northern California is now recognized in the same way, and therefore needs a capital N.

3. In proper nouns which include a general noun (Washington Blvd., Colorado River, the Rocky Mountains), the general noun is also capitalized. However, in the fifteenth edition of Chicago, that changed if the general noun was plural. No more. Now in the sixteenth edition, even general nouns that are plural are capitalized. For example, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (rather than Atlantic and Pacific oceans), Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks, and Greenleaf and Whittier Avenues.

4. Brand names beginning with a lowercase letter, such as iPad, should now remain as is, even when beginning a sentence.

Example: iPads come in several sizes.

5. Capitalizing titles using headline style.

a. Capitalize the second element in a hyphenated number such as Twenty-Two, Fifty-One, or Eighty-Six.

b. Capitalize even the “short or unstressed” words; in other words, capitalize the articles a, an, the and all prepositions.

I admit this one makes a lot of sense. Uniformity is easier to remember and at least some word processing programs already make this sweeping capitalization in “title mode.” For me, however, it takes some getting used to. I often remember the new rule when I title my blog posts, for instance, then revert back to old habits when writing the content.

c. When a title includes quoted material, those words are now capitalized headline style, just like the rest of the title.

That’s it, I think. But I recommend becoming a fan of the Chicago Facebook page where you can receive brief rules tips regularly.