Chapter
The very last target for proofreading as you finalize your draft for submission is mechanics. In English composition, mechanics relates to typographic styles, such as the choice between UPPERCASE and lowercase letters, italics or boldface type and plain style, as well as using figures (e.g., 1, 2, 3) or written out numbers (e.g., one, two, three). Professionals follow stylistic conventions for mechanics much like they do for punctuation rules. If you don’t know these conventions, making them up as you go along may produce unprofessional-looking documents. Consider the following as your guide for how to get your writing mechanics right.
- Capitalizing
- Italicizing, Underlining, and Bolding
- Numbering
Capitalizing
One of the worst mistakes you can make in a high-priority document such as a cover letter is a glaring capitalization error like not capitalizing the first letter in a sentence or writing “im” or “ive” instead of “I am” or “I have.” These errors are fine when texting your friends, but when communicating with a hiring manager, the red flags they raise concerning the maturity and attention to detail that an applicant might lack could land that application in the shredder. In standardized writing, we use conventional combinations of capitals and lowercase letters meaningfully to guide our readers through our sentences. Let’s take a closer look at when to capitalize and when not to capitalize letters.
- What to Capitalize
- What Not to Capitalize
- Abbreviations
General Rules
You can’t go wrong if you capitalize in the following situations:
- First letter of the first word of a:
- Sentence: e.g., These pretzels are making me thirsty.
- Full-sentence quotation, even if it appears after a signal phrase; e.g., A great American humorist put it best when he said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” (Twain, p. 333).
- Rule following a colon in a sentence; e.g., My mother taught me the golden rule: Treat others the way you’d like to be treated yourself
- Points in a bullet point or numbered list, regardless of whether it’s a full sentence or just a noun phrase, as in this list
- The first-person personal pronoun “I”
- Major words in titles, including the first letter of the first word no matter what it is, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, but not short prepositions such as in, of, on, or to, nor coordinating conjunctions such as and, but, for, or so, unless they’re the first word (see Table below for several example titles)
- The first letter of proper nouns, which include the types given below in the table
Proper Nouns
| Proper Noun Type | Examples |
|---|---|
| People and professional roles or familial relations preceding the name | Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Roberta Bondar, Professor Patrick Grant, Mayor Humdinger, Ludwig van Beethoven, Aunt Pam, Jesus, Buddha |
| Adjectives derived from names | Shakespearean sonnet, Freudian slip |
| Major buildings and infrastructure | CN Tower, the Quee