Sentence case, Title Case, or ALL CAPS?

One of the most common issues we run into as editors is capitalization—starting certain words with a capital letter or using capital letters for entire words. In regular text, we often see too much of it, in some cases making English begin to look like German, which capitalizes all nouns.

But in titles and headings, whether in books, websites, reports, or other formats, confusion usually reigns. This isn’t surprising given the range of possibilities, the variations in preference from style guide to style guide, and the complex rules for headline-style capitalization. Even the names of the styles can be confusing: Sentence style or sentence case? Headline style or title case? Thankfully, the recently released 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) has helped clarify that, landing on “sentence case” and “title case” and aligning itself with the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA).

Here is a brief summary of three different capitalization styles for headings and subheadings: sentence case, title case, and all capitals, also called all caps.

Sentence case

As the name suggests, capitalization in sentence case is the same as in a regular sentence: capitalize (or cap) only the first word and any other words that would normally start with a capital, including formal names of people, places, and things. Of course, all the usual complexities around what should be capped and what shouldn’t—for example, job titles—still apply.

While there are no hard and fast rules about when to use sentence case for headings, some style guides, like the Government of British Columbia’s Web Style Guide, do specify the use of sentence case for web page titles and headings. Both The Associated Press Stylebook and The Canadian Press Stylebook, the leading style guides for journalism in the United States and Canada, respectively, also prefer sentence case.

There is some agreement that sentence case is easier to read and is therefore more accessible. To my eye, at least, sentence case is more casual and, well, just friendlier.

Title case

Many writers seem to think the rules for capitalizing in title case are based on word length—so anything, say, three letters long or less should be lower case and everything else should be capitalized. In fact, the guidelines for title case are based on word function and placement, which requires writers to know the parts of speech.

Using title case, the first and last words of a heading are capitalized, along with everything in the middle except certain things, including:

• Articles (a, an, the)
• Coordinating conjunctions (for example, and, but, yet, or, nor, for, so)
• Prepositions (for example, in, on, at, to, up) of less than four or five letters, depending on the style
• The infinitive “to” (for example, to be, to go)

As if that’s not enough to keep in mind, there are a few other exceptions as well, like prepositions used as adjectives or adverbs, and the second part of a species name. So it’s not surprising that the use of title case can produce errors and inconsistencies. (That’s why I have CMOS 8.160 and APA 6.17 on speed dial.)

All caps

Using all caps anywhere generally gets a bad rap these days, because it’s believed to affect readability. For example, Harvard University’s Digital Accessibility Services recommends avoiding all caps: “Readability is reduced with all caps because all words have a uniform rectangular shape, meaning readers can’t identify words by their shape.” And here’s the US government’s Federal Plain Language Guidelines on the use of all caps for emphasis:

PUTTING EVERYTHING IN CAPITAL LETTERS IS NOT A GOOD EMPHASIS TECHNIQUE. ALTHOUGH IT MAY DRAW THE USER’S ATTENTION TO THE SECTION, IT MAKES IT HARDER TO READ. AND IN AN ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENT IT’S CONSIDERED SHOUTING. (p. 82)

Some style guides allow for a bit of discretion. CMOS, for example, says book designers “have creative license to apply all caps, lowercase, or other capitalization styles . . . for aesthetic reasons”—on the title page (1.21). All things considered, whether for accessibility or aesthetic reasons, it’s probably best to avoid using all caps in headings. Yet it persists in many of the documents we edit.

What do you think?

My own preference is the friendlier sentence case, though I enjoy sorting out the tangles in title case when I have to. More than a few words in all caps makes me want to run screaming from my desk. What about you? Do you have a preference?