By Markskrill
•
January 31, 2025
G'day! Markskrill here, your favorite crustacean. Today, we're gonna tackle a topic that's got more twists and turns than a croc in a washing machine: capitalisation in titles and headings. Now, before you go chuckin' a wobbly, let me tell ya, it ain't as dry as a dead dingo's donger. We can have fun while we learn, let's not get too crazy with it though, I have to work tonight. First things first, let's have a squiz on why capitalisation matters. See, when you're craftin' a top-notch blog post, you want your titles and headings to grab readers by the eyeballs and scream, "Read me!" And proper capitalisation plays a big part in making that happen. Now, here at Marksy.com.au, we're big fans of sentence case. That means we only capitalise the first word of a title or heading, along with any proper nouns that happen to be hangin' around. Think of it like this: it's casual, laid-back, just like a Sunday arvo with your mates, smashing back cans. But why sentence case, you ask? It turns out, the American Psychological Association (APA), the gurus of academic writing, are also partial to a bit of sentence case. And get this—it all stems from those ancient printing presses! Apparently, way back in the day, it was less costly and more accessible to print in sentence case. We're now writing most of our blog post titles in sentence case. Why? It looks weird to capitalise almost every word! We still do it occasionally for website design, but not everywhere like a capitalisation gremlin. Now, I know what you're thinkin'. "Markskrill, what about other style guides, like Chicago style?" Well, big fella, that's a whole different story. Chicago style is all about title case, which means capitalising most of the words in a title. It's a bit fancy-pants, like wearin' a top hat to Bunnings. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is consistency. Pick a style and stick to it like a blue-tongue lizard on a hot rock. If in doubt capitalise every major word so that no one will find out that you don't know what a proper noun is. When using title case, don't capitalise minor words (this means three letters or fewer). Doing this will make you look competent when writing titles and headings for your blog posts. Before you skedaddle, if you ever find yourself in a straitjacket, just remember your old mate Markskrill is here to help ya out.