Help:Sentence case

Sentence case is one of several types of capitalization patterns:


 * this is lower case


 * This is sentence case


 * This Is Title Case (use only for titles of book and journals)


 * this is CamelCase


 * THIS IS UPPER CASE (never use it)

Sentence case is almost always the best one to use. The only words with capital letters are the first word in the sentence, heading, or line, plus proper nouns, capitalized abbreviations, and the names of books, etc. All other words are lower case. The main advantage is that it allows us to discriminate between ordinary and proper nouns, which Title Case doesn't allow. It also removes the confusion about whether words like the or and should be capitalized. Finally, and importantly, it avoids a bug in MediaWiki that gets confused about case in article titles.

You will notice that most newspapers, magazines, and journals use sentence case for headlines and article titles. For some reason, we seem to teach the use of title case to school children — just one of the many typographic abominations we teach them (underlining being one of the most insidious others).

Use Title Case for the names of books and journals, but not for article titles or headings, even if the journal uses Title Case for article titles.