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Subject:Sentence case or Title Case? From:Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> To:TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, "Hickling, Lisa (TOR)" <lhickling -at- Express-Scripts -dot- com> Date:Tue, 18 Apr 2006 16:10:59 -0400
Lisa Hickling wondered: <<If you were your system's UI designer would
you recommend *Sentence case* or *Title Case* for labels and columns?
Even if you lean toward both which would you select if you had to make
one choice for uniform application?>>
Note that "title case" most often means capping nouns, verbs, and other
major words, but this is not a universal definition; when I design
publications, titles only get a capital for the first letter in the
heading and for any proper nouns. This is a very common type of title
style, and saying "title case" doesn't distinguish between the two.
So the real question is whether to use capitalization or not. My
preference is (as noted above) to follow standard English rules for
capitalization: first word of a sentence (or title), and only proper
nouns thereafter*. Because this follows standard English, it's easy to
implement. It also appears more consistent than mixed capitalization,
which routinely creates problems over how long a word has to be before
you capitalize it even if it's a part of speech that wouldn't
ordinarily be capped--and the results always look inconsistent to
readers who aren't editors.
* In the context of a user interface, this can be extended to interface
objects or menu names. By capping them, you're effectively treating
them as proper nouns and making them stand out from the surrounding
text because they're capped. For example: "Using the Open menu and the
Open File command". See how the interface words stand out? If you were
capping all main words, "menu" and "command" would also take caps, and
suddenly you need another way to distinguish the UI names.
That being said, both title styles are commonly used, so you can pick
whichever one suits your specific tastes. My objections to mixed
capitalization probably aren't terribly significant in the real world.
There are almost always much more serious problems than whether
headings are capped. See our recent debate over gerunds, for example.
<g>
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