Social media, job titles, and different software or email requirements have all added to a growing confusion regarding capitalization rules. Let’s review some of the major rules for capitalization.
This is the rule you learned way back in elementary school. (There’s a reason it used to be called grammar school). A proper noun is a specific person, place, or thing.
Here are some examples:
• Nelson Mandela (person)
• The Louvre (place)
• Microsoft (thing)
Notice how these are all names of specific people, places, or things, not generic people (doctor), places (playground), or things (computer).
Here is a more detailed list of nouns you should capitalize:
• Names of companies, institutions, and brands
• Days, Months, and Holidays
• Governmental Bodies
• Names of cities, states, and countries (and roads/streets within those)
• Names of monuments (man-made or not)
• Planets
• Religions and the names of their deities
• Races, ethnicities, and nationalities aside from black and white
These are where some of the confusion stems from. Job titles seem specific and general all at once (you can be a doctor or Dr. Smith, right?). In general, job titles that come BEFORE a name are capitalized, while those that come AFTER a name are not.
For example:
• President Donald Trump
• Marlene Kim, president
• Professor Kathryn Archard
• Kathryn Archard, professor
Like almost everything related to English grammar, the rules can sometimes be broken. Sometimes you will have a boss or a supervisor who always wants his or her title capitalized. Sometimes, not capitalizing something looks like sloppy formatting (in a brochure, table, or program, for example). In both of these circumstances, capitalize!
You can’t break the above rules whenever you want, though. When you capitalize something “randomly,” for example, to add emphasis on social media or within an email, you confuse your readers because they assume it is a proper noun.
Recently, I was interviewed by CNN about President Trump's tendency to capitalize phrases in his his tweets that normally would not be capitalized.