Technical Writers’ Companion

▪Caps- and lowercase-style capitalization is more widely used (exceptions: sales literature, newspaper articles, and web articles).

▪Visually, headings can be identified more easily, especially if the format of the headings resembles the format of body text.

▪Sentence-style capitalization is easier to read, especially on a screen and within a long table of contents.

▪You don’t have to follow any special conventions, so you’re less prone to making errors.

As an option, you can mix capitalization styles to highlight different hierarchical levels. For example, you can use caps- and lowercase-style capitalization for level 1 headings but sentence-style capitalization for all levels below. Or you can use caps- and lowercase-style capitalization for topic headings and sentence-style capitalization for subheadings.

If you use caps and lowercase style:

▪Capitalize the first word and the last word, no matter what these words are.

▪Capitalize the first word after a colon, no matter what this word is.

▪In general, capitalize all other words as well unless they’re mentioned in the following rules.

▪Don’t alter the capitalization of abbreviations, feature names, product names, company names, and case-sensitive words. If one of these words is the first word, try to rewrite the heading.

▪Don’t capitalize articles (a, an, the).

▪Don’t capitalize coordinate conjunctions (and, as, but, or, nor, so, for, yet).

▪Capitalize Is, Are, Be, If, It, Its, That, This, Than.

▪Don’t capitalize the following prepositions and adverbs: at, by, for, of, in, up, on, to. Many style guides also suggest not capitalizing from, into, off, onto, out, over, and with, without, within.
However, always capitalize the mentioned prepositions if they’re part of a verb phrase, such as Set … Up, Plug … In, and so on.

▪Capitalize each word of a hyphenated compound if the word after the hyphen is a noun or proper adjective, or if the words have equal weight.
Don’t capitalize a second word that modifies the first word, such as Follow-up, Add-in.

▪If a short word that would usually be lowercased according to listed rules is used in parallel with a capitalized word of equal significance, capitalize the short word as well.

▪In words that use the letter “e” as a short form for “electronic,” capitalize both the “E” and the first letter.