The Writer's Handbook - Write & Publish Like Industry Professionals

CAPITALIZATION

To capitalize or not to capitalize. That is the question. And it's a tricky one, which is why we are going to cover this subject sooner rather than later, to save you a ton of time-consuming, pesky edits in the future.

We've all been there, especially those who write fantasy, historical and sci-fi genres. It is the Commandant or the commandant? Is it the Queen or the queen?

What about writing in the possessive? Is it the King's chariot or the king's chariot? 

Or what about specific places and locations? Do we write the Temple or the temple? 

In The Lost Valor of Love, my capitalization errors were raised by the copy editor (and that's the job of a copy editor, to catch the micro issues in the manuscript, unlike an editor whose job is to cover the macro issues like character development, plot, story arc and pacing). I was politely told my errors were not only wrong, but amateurist and any reader worth their salt would spot my mistakes a mile away. They sent the manuscript back, leaving me to figure out the ins and outs of which nouns get capitalized and which ones don't. Easier said than done.

It turned out to be a much steeper learning curve than I expected, involving a lot of emails back and forth to my copy editor to clarify trickier nouns. It took me almost a week to wrap my head around the nuances of capitalizing nouns (and there are some very shady areas of gray).

So let's take an example from my book - the very first line, in fact. 

In the sweltering heat of the Egyptian sun, the Pharaoh's eyes are cold, like the icy, silent winters of Tarhuntassa.     

I presumed because I was writing about Ramesses specifically I could capitalize his title, 'pharaoh', which I understood was allowed when one wished to use the character's title in place of their name. However I learned I could not because 'pharaoh' was preceded by the word 'the', a big no-no for capitals (with just one exception, more on that below).

When I removed the capital, it felt wrong, even though the sentence was correct. I felt readers wouldn't know who I was talking about. But as it turned out, it was a non-issue, it's just a matter of perception, and there is actually less confusion when errant capitals are removed from a manuscript. If someone had enlightened me about the subtler rules of capitalization it would have made my writing clean, consistent and professional (and saved me several days' worth of frantic researching and searching for a multitude of stray capitals under a tight deadline). 

Here is the correct version of the first sentence that went to press.

In the sweltering heat of the Egyptian sun, the pharaoh's eyes are cold, like the icy, silent winters of Tarhuntassa.     

It turns out the capital in the first version added no value whatsoever. So why do we capitalise common nouns? It appears to originate from how we visualise the narrative in our head as we are writing; we need the important characters and places to stand out from the rest of the background noise and this naturally translates into our writing (fine for a first draft, not okay for a submission to an agent). Even though it seems counterintuitive, we are not allowed to capitalize anything that isn't a proper noun (and the tricky part is stopping yourself from capitalizing nouns which seem like proper nouns but aren't - and they are out there just waiting to catch you unawares). 

So to help clarify the nuances of noun capitalization in writing, I have put together a little cheat sheet to help you based on what I learned from my copy editor and from my own research. I hope it helps you see the differences between honest-to-goodness proper nouns and rogue imposter nouns that look almost exactly like proper nouns but aren't.