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Subject:Re: Heading and Title Capitalization From:"Porrello, Leonard" <lcporrel -at- ESSVOTE -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 2 Mar 1999 08:57:00 -0600
Phil,
As it pertains to our topic, "rule" means. . .
*An authoritative direction for conduct or procedure; regulation.
*A usual or customary course for action or behavior.
*A statement that describes what is true in most or all cases.
*A standard method or procedure" (_The American Heritage Dictionary, Based on the Second College Edition)
Of course Chicago and MLA provide rules. What they do not provide is "laws."
Leonard Porrello
-----Original Message-----
Porrello, Leonard wrote: Since the rule (Chicago and MLA) regarding
titles is to capitalize the first letter of every content word, to deviate
might unwarrantedly attract a literate user's attention.
You refer to Chicago (Chicago Manual of Style I assume) and MLA (?) as
providing rules. Neither of these publications, or any other style guide,
provides rules - they can only provide conventions and guidelines. The very
nature of style today is that there are very few (if any rules) that
ultimately cannot be broken or redefined.
