Avoiding Over-Capitalization

A few weeks ago we discussed proper capitalization, and I mentioned that I would discuss the capitalization of words you make up for your story. These could be devices or technologies that you thought up, magical spells or items, or fictional illnesses and conditions. They could be unusual offices in a fictional government, brand names from a science-fiction universe, aspects of an alien culture, or places in another world.

The majority of words that require capitalization are proper nouns—names, titles, and the like; and, in most stories, the majority of made-up words will also be proper nouns. This means that a particularly complex science fiction or fantasy story can often end up with a high density of capitalized words.

Now, many experienced writers and editors advise that you avoid having too many made-up words in your story (I gave you that advice in this post). Unfortunately, one of the easiest and most common methods of avoiding made-up words is to take a common English word and capitalize it to show that it is significant. So instead of calling the council that rules your fictional society the Shoraki, you might call it the Council. Thus, while this method does avoid creating extra made-up words, it doesn’t cut down on the number of capital letters. This can sometimes lead to paragraphs that look like this:

     Thuum reached into the Golden Cask and removed the Sword of Ramunothet, grinning from ear to ear. When he presented this to the Council, everyone would see that he was the greatest of all the Hunters. And best of all, Norrikis would be forced to serve him as his Du’Shan.

     Cradling the sword in the crook of his arm, Thuum turned to leave and paused. Standing in the door to the Temple was a black-shrouded figure—an Ayelet Assassin. The man raised a gloved hand, revealing a Zurasha Gem in his palm. The gem began to glow as the Assassin focused his Mentalis within it.

Yeesh, am I right? That might seem like a deliberately exaggerated example, but it’s not—I have in fact encountered similar paragraphs in the wild.

There are many ways to avoid excessive amounts of capitalization: you can re-word a title or sentence to remove the need for a capitalized word; you can insert more action in order to further space out any capitalized words; or you can just decide that this is your world and these are your made-up words, so you can just not capitalize them if you don’t want to. It’s up to you, after all, to decide whether your made-up words are proper nouns that require capitalization, common nouns that don’t, or once-proper nouns that have reached such a level of ubiquity in the culture that they no longer require capitalization.

Here’s what that example might look like after some toning down:

     Thuum reached into the golden cask and removed the Ramunothet’s sword, grinning from ear to ear. When he presented this to the council, everyone would see that he was the greatest of all the Hunters; and best of all, Norrikis would be forced to serve him as his du’shan.

     Cradling the sword in the crook of his arm, Thuum turned to leave and paused. Standing in the door to the temple was a black-shrouded figure—an Ayelet assassin. The man raised a gloved hand to reveal a Zurasha gem in his palm, which began to glow with focused mentalis.

We’ve gone from twenty-four capital letters to ten. Hopefully, we can all agree that the second example is much more pleasant to look at and feels a little less like an over-done cliché. So keep an eye out for over-capitalization—remember, neither everything of significance in your story nor every word that you make up needs to be capitalized.

This is more or less pertinent to the article, right? Eh, close enough.

On Capitalization

A hallmark of amateur writing that will quickly cause most editors to lose interest in a manuscript is improper capitalization. This includes both capitalizing letters that shouldn’t be capitalized and not capitalizing letters that should have been capitalized.

On the surface, this is a simple issue—we all know to capitalize proper nouns (names) and the first word of a sentence. But there are all sorts of unusual or complicated situations that can arise when you’re composing something as substantial as a novel. For instance, I have often seen sentences like this:

     “I’m an English Major, but my girlfriend is a Chemistry Major.”

There are two things wrong with that sentence. First, the word major should not be capitalized—many people simply feel like it’s supposed to be capitalized since it’s paired with the capitalized subject of the major (English and Chemistry in this case), but it should be lowercase. But wait! That’s not all. Chemistry shouldn’t be capitalized in that example, either.  The only school subjects that should be capitalized are languages—English, Spanish, Russian, etcetera—because they are adjectives derived from proper nouns (England, Spain, Russia, etcetera). So the above example should be written like this:

     “I’m an English major, but my girlfriend is a chemistry major.”

Thank you to xkcd for almost always having a relevant comic for my needs.

Now, I could fill pages and pages with all the little rules of which words should be capitalized and which words shouldn’t. I’m not going to, however, because Jane Straus has already done a fantastic job of that over at GrammarBook.com. If I were to write a full post on capitalization, it would basically be a near-word-for-word copy of hers, so I’m not going to waste the energy. I’ll just recommend that you go check out her post on capitalization—read the article, bookmark the page, and reference it often.

That post will also be a handy guide for helping you decide whether or not to capitalize words that you make up—if you’re writing science fiction or fantasy, for instance. Check back here in the next week or two for additional guidelines on that particular subject.

And don't forget to check out my post on capitalization in dialog tags.

Dialog Tags: Capitalization

A dialog tag is the bit of prose that identifies who is speaking. If the tag follows the dialog, it should begin with a lower-case letter, unless it is a title or name which is always capitalized. The punctuation of the dialog (i.e. whether the dialog ended in a comma, a question mark, or anything else) has no effect on capitalization.

Examples:

Incorrect:  “I’m doing fine,” She said.

Correct:    “I’m doing fine,” she said.

Incorrect:  “What do we do now?” The man said.

Correct:    “What do we do now?” the man said.

Incorrect:  “Hi there!” She said.

Correct:    “Hi there!” Sarah said.