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Did You Know...
- Warren has been a technical writer since 1994
May 1, 2009 | 6:21 pm
Since 1994 I have established and maintained a thriving technical writing consulting business. During this time I have been responsible for designing, authoring, and publishing on-line help systems, websites, user guides, requirement and design specifications, policies and procedures, training materials, and promotional products. I also offer training courses on technical writing to industry and through [...] -
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- CBE Document Storehouse This is the Document Storehouse for CBE LINC materials. You will require special permission to access the CBE Document Storehouse.
- CityDesk Primer This wiki-site introduces the content management system (CMS) tool CityDesk and includes worked examples of how to use CityDesk to manage your website and online content.
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- Support Request Tracking For those of you that have a maintenance arrangement with Technical Expressions, this support and maintenenace request tracking system lets you tell us what you need, and then monitor our progress.
- Technical Expressions' Wiki This wiki-site provides resources to myself and other technical writers and web designers.
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Mar
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Capitals in headings
March 5, 2009
We often feel uncertain about how to capitalize words in headings. “Should everything be capitalized?”; “Isn’t there are rule about not capitalizing articles and prepositions, and what is a preposition anyway?”
There are some very hard an fast rules about how to capitalize English words in sentences, to learn about these see the article When to capitalize. However, when it comes to capitalizing headings, there are only hard and fast suggestions and expectations, but no rules. In the absence of rules, we at least want to be consistent, so publishing organizations have developed styleguides that include recommendations on how to capitalize headings. The five styleguides that influence most of the publications we read include the American Psychological Association (APA) Publication Manual, the Canadian Press (CP) Stylebook, the Chicago Manual of Style, the Modern Language Association (MLA) Handbook, and the Plain Language Commission (PLC) recommendations. The reason we find capitalizing headings confusing is that each one has different recommendations.
To help us figure out what to do, let’s quickly review the recommendations of each of these styleguides, and then finish with some advice from common business writing experience.
