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Chapter 9.11 Capital Letters

Using Capital Letters

With the advent of new social networking structures, such as text messaging, IM (instant messaging), and Instagram, the reliance on traditional standard capital letters has been relaxed in informal settings. The use of capital letters required additional efforts for people using only a couple of fingers or thumbs for typing words, and this laxity of capitalization became more commonplace.

Rather quickly, the use of abbreviations and lack of capital letters became fashionable—almost like a status symbol indicating a person’s social networking awareness. Despite the common exclusion of capital letters in personal situations, capital letters are still the proper choice in professional and academic settings. If you are someone who writes far more often on a cell phone than on a computer, you are likely to benefit from a brush-up on capitalization rules for those occasions when you are composing more official documents.

 

Man on Phone    Man on Internet at Work

Common and Proper Nouns

Some words are capitalized whenever they are used. The following video from Khan Academy explains the difference between common and proper nouns:

Capitalization Rules and Examples

 

Exercise

On a separate sheet of paper, write the words that need to be capitalized. The lines indicate how many words need to be capitalized.

  1. my sister said, “don’t forget kalyn’s party. ____________  ______________  _____________
  2. Next week, uncle dave and aunt gloria are seeing dr. Mendoza. ____________  ______________  _____________   ______________   _____________
  3. Martin Luther king, Jr. participated in the civil rights movement. ____________  ______________  _____________  ______________
  4. i have always wanted to visit the south, particularly savannah, Georgia. ____________  ______________  _____________
  5. Barbara is lutheran; Ruth is jewish. They both work at the home depot. ____________  ______________  _____________   ______________
  6. Joy’s birthday falls in the winter, but she’s thankful that it’s not on christmas. _____________
  7. Jose’s cats prefer friskies cat chow over purina cat food. _____________  _______________
  8. The book shoeless joe was made into the movie field of dreams. ____________  ______________  _____________   ______________
  9. To graduate, Dwayne needs to take english 102, intercultural communications, and a science class. ____________  ______________
  10. Pietro went to high school in boston, but he attended college at arizona state university. ____________  ______________  _____________  ______________

 

Attributions

Using Capital Letters adapted from Chapter 19 “Mechanics” in Writer’s Handbook v 1.0 used according to Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Media Attributions

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Introduction to Composition Copyright © by Shelley Decker; Mary Kieser; Heather Moulton; and Peter Shipman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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