USAGE: Title Case [Was: USAGE: YAEUT: "proper"]

On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 17:37 -0500, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> The specific details of title case vary widely, depending on the
> particular textbook, style guide, or house style. See
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization#Headings_and_publication_titles.
>  But the convention I was taught, and incidentally the one that
> appears on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Sandiego, has lowercase
> for both "in" and "is" in that title.
>
The usual guide where British (proper?) English is concerned is that of
Oxford University Press ("Hart's Rules").

"Nouns, adjectives, and verbs are usually given capitals; pronouns and
adverbs may or may not be capitalised; articles, conjunctions, and
prepositions are usually left uncapitalised."

"… a more modern practice … is to apply the capitalisation of normal
prose. This style of minimal capitalisation, which has long been
standard in bibliography, is being adopted more quickly in academic and
technical publications than in general contexts."

Open Office does things like "The Cat In The Hat", so it's not just
Micro$oft. It seems to be a computer thing.

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