Title Case

Some of your were bemoaning the convention of title case -- what do I capitalize? Everything? Nothing? Should I just use a font that's pretty much all capital letters so I don't even have to worry about it? Gah!

It can be frustrating to figure out which words get to be capitalized (thus, deemed important) and which get to be lower case (thus, shuffled over and soon forgotten) when crafting a title, something some of you have yet to master...but more on that later.

Here's the deal: there's virtually no official agreement when it comes to matters of grammar and style. There are different schools of thought, different "camps" that have widely different philosophies of language and linguistic conventions. This isn't license to dismiss all of them and just do what you want because [whine] it's haaaaaaard but rather a fact of reality. Get a style guide to follow in those moments of uncertainty. Look it up. Memorize it. Whatever. Regardless of which method you prefer, consistency is key. Also important is what is required of you...you know, form, audience, purpose? If you wind up with a professor who adores Chicago Manual Style, get ready to learn that set of rules. APA with it's glorious running header is loads of fun and MLA seems to change every few months or so. It's wise to have a general understanding of these different publication styles and wiser still to understand the motives behind them. What does CMS focus on? APA? MLA? APA cares more about when a work was published while MLS cares more about who published it. There's more, obviously, but even the basics can help you remember which requires what.

Okay, back to titles. Here's what we (schoolteachers) usually require of you:

Title case, or up style, is another method. Whether or not you capitalize a word in a title depends on its part of speech. According to most style guides that use title case, the basic rules are as follows:

• Capitalize the first and last word in a title, regardless of part of speech
• Capitalize all nouns (baby, country, picture), pronouns (you, she, it), verbs (walk, think, dream), adjectives (sweet, large, perfect), adverbs (immediately, quietly), and subordinating conjunctions (as, because, although)
• Lowercase “to” as part of an infinitive
• Lowercase all articles (a, the), prepositions (to, at, in, with), and coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or)

For example:

Why It’s Never Too Late to Learn Grammar (all words capitalized except “to,” a preposition)

This handy explanation hails from Daily Writing Tips. http://www.dailywritingtips.com/rules-for-capitalization-in-titles/  a blog, offering--you guessed it--daily writing tips. Subscribe. As the sample title indicates, it's never too late to learn grammar. Go learn it. It's really quite fascinating.

Or, it's at least reasonably useful anyway.

On Renewal (or something)

Well, here we are. 2013. A new year, full of resolutions and commitments of renewal, reinvention. It's a tradition that we have, this reinvention. We do it every New Year, every birthday, every spring, every new school year, every time we embark on some "new" timeline. This time will be different we think to ourselves. Maybe we genuinely believe it will be, or at least we genuinely want it to be, but it usually isn't. So what? We all excel at goal-setting and fail at follow-through? Perhaps.

But maybe it has more to do with our tendency to get swept up in well-intended, but empty traditions. Our tendency to believe in the media-spun myths of self-improvement. We cannot be content to be content with ourselves. Instead, we must strive for "improvement" which is more likely to mean "perfection" but we know that's pointless so we call it something else. What was that Shakespeare said about roses and their names?

Now, I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with trying to better ourselves; it' good to have goals. What I wonder about--especially this time of year--is our motives and whether they're as productive as we usually claim them to be. You want to run a marathon? Great; start training for it. But why do you suddenly want to run a marathon? Didn't use your gym membership as much as you should have in the last twelve months? Okay, fine, but what's different now? What's so special about January that will suddenly make you get off your duff and pound the treadmill regularly? Nothing.

Nothing is really different. It's just that in the days surrounding our holiday festivities, we're inundated with advertisements for discounted gym memberships and Quitplans and the like. We're encouraged to participate in "commitment days" in which we all pledge together to do whatever it is we say we're going to do. Hoping that maybe going public will keep us accountable. It's a public relations stunt. It's a tradition. It's something to talk about once those other holidays have passed. It's just one more of those things that we do.

And yet, there's something...human, I guess, about reflecting when we come to the end of a time and approach a new one--even if it is constructed for us and rather orchestrated. We learn from reflection and it is through that reflection that we can make changes, it's just a matter of whether or not we do. And that, it turns out, has nothing to do with the season. 


 

Sedaris: Crumpet the Elf

Here's the video of the Santaland Diaries excerpt in case you were gone or just want to watch it again because it's pretty funny.