In Romanized writing, capitalization is important and, in some cases, can change a sentence’s entire meaning. That’s why all ESL writers who produce document in English are highly-advised to get their heads around the proper rules for this specific area.
When people first learn English from their English learning software, they are immediately told to capitalize proper nouns, but to leave common nouns without it. That sounds simple enough, right? Problem is, many people don’t understand the correct distinction between those two groups of nouns. Neither are they familiar with the additional rules that govern capitalization.
So, let’s start with the basics:
- Proper nouns refer to specific people, places or things (e.g. Mrs. Jones, President Obama, Omaha Flower Festival)
- Common nouns are nonspecific (e.g. teacher, leader, festival)
Apart from those two basic rules, take note of the following items that also require capitalization:
- The first word of every sentence
- The first-person pronoun “I”
- Days of the week, months and holidays
- Historical documents, periods and events
- Religions and their followers
- Titles of books, plays, movies and other creative works
- Personifications, as in creative names given to characters in writing
- Companies and organizations
- Derivatives of proper nouns (e.g. Westernize, Shakespearean, etc.)
- Names of classes in school (e.g. Math 101, Colonial History 102, etc.)
- Acronyms
- Official titles if they come before the name (e.g. Colonel Sanders, Miss Simmons, etc)
Note that some usage may require you to do without capitalization. That may be beyond our scope for this short article, though. We’ll look at those exceptions another time.