10 Grammar Rules Every Teacher Should Know

Rule #7 Capitalize Carefully
This rule is easy (especially after the nuances of verb subject and noun pronoun agreement!). In normal writing you only capitalize proper nouns—formal names of people, places and things:

Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, is a Finn who used to work for the largest company in Europe—Nokia.

Titles are capitalized only when they stand in for the name of the specific person or thing. For instance:

The President landed at the airport.

(“President” stands in for “Bill Clinton”)

Words like airport, hospital, school, mall and store aren’t capitalized because they are used in a general sense. When we want our reader to know the specific airport, hospital, school, mall or store, we must cite its actual name:

The President landed at Boeing Field then stopped by Nordstrom’s in the mall.

Capitalization is important in citations (entire manuals are dedicated to these—check out the MLA handbook for humanities and the APA manual for sciences). Capitalization also highlights titles, subtitles and labels in texts. For these uses, you are free to choose whatever style you like, provided you are consistent and clear throughout the text.

There is one important caveat for capitalization. Capitalizing words in regular text for emphasis isn’t good style, it’s bad grammar. If you’d like to show inflection by marking a particular word (as in the previous sentence), use italics, underlining, bold or—if the word(s) carries the utmost importance—use all capital letters (referred to as ALL CAPS). If you simply capitalize the first letter of a word, you give the reader the impression that it is a title or formal name, which can be very confusing. Compare:

I want every student to know These Rules. (WRONG!)

I want every student to know these rules. (CORRECT!)

I want every student to know these rules. (CORRECT!)
I want every student to know these rules. (CORRECT!)
I want every student to know THESE RULES. (CORRECT!)

I want every student to know THESE RULES. (OVERKILL!)