When and how to use capital letters can be a thorny problem. It may be acceptable to drop capital letters when writing casually to friends but if you are writing anything more formal then you need to use capital letters correctly.
This page lists the rules, and provides examples of when to use (and when not to use) capital letters in English writing.
Rule 1: To start a sentence
There are no exceptions to this rule.
This means that, after a full stop, you always use a capital letter.
If the previous sentence ends with a question mark or exclamation mark, you should also use a capital letter, ? and !, like full stops, indicate the end of a sentence. However if in the sentence you have a clause in parenthesis (brackets) or sequence separated by dashes, and if these end with a question mark or exclamation mark, you should continue with lower case after the second bracket or dash.
Is it always necessary to use capitals to start a sentence? The answer is definitely yes.
She told herself – was it acceptable to talk to oneself? – that the answer was obvious.
The use of a capital after a colon (:) varies depending on whether you are writing in British or US English, just as the spelling of 'capitalisation' and 'capitalization' are different in British and US English.
You should use a capital letter after a colon with US spelling but not with UK spelling.
Rule 2:
Titles
In titles, capitalise only the important words, not minor words such as ‘and’ and ‘but’.
‘Title Case’, with all the important words capitalised, is rather out of fashion at the moment. Most academic journals and standard referencing systems, for instance, prefer what is known as ‘sentence case’, with a single initial capital.
However, it’s good to understand the rules, in case you are required to use title case at any point.
Using the title of this article as an example:
Sentence case: “When to use capital letters”
Title case: “When to Use Capital Letters”
In title case, in this example, ‘Use’, although small, is an important word in the title, and should therefore be capitalised. ‘To’, however, is not important and therefore not capitalised.
Rule 3:
For Proper Nouns
Proper nouns name something specific, for example, Jane, John, Oxford University, Denver, Qantas, Microsoft, Everest, Sahara. See our pages on
Grammar for more information.
Proper nouns (nearly) always start with a capital letter. There are exceptions to this rule and in marketing sometimes lower-case characters are purposefully used for some proper nouns. Examples include iPhone, eBay and oneworld Alliance. However, in most cases, proper nouns start with a capital letter.
Caution is needed however, even when you are referring to a specific place or thing. If you use the more general noun rather than the proper noun, this should not be capitalised.
Further examples:
“I went to the University of Oxford today.”
“I went to Oxford today and had a look at the university.”
Capitalising is correct in both sentences. In the first the proper noun 'University of Oxford' is used.
In the second sentence, the more general noun ‘university’ is used and so it is not capitalised.
The word 'I' is not a proper noun, it's a pronoun. In English 'I' is always capitalised. In many other languages the equivalent word is not capitalised.
For the full list of rules, please visit
the website here.
