A friend of mine told me today that his "thing" this semester has been to forget to underline the titles of books in essays. I told him my "thing" this semester is to forget the rules for capitalization.
I've had to fill out several, and I mean several, applications and this capitalization thing is getting out of hand. For example, if I'm referring to the University of Iowa as "the university," do I need to capitalize it?
Who better to set me straight than A Pocket Style Manual?
Besides learning which univeristy the author cheers for (under common nouns the author writes "a good univeristy," cross from it, under proper nouns it says, "University of Wisconsin"), it seems to me that university did not need to be capitalized. Good thing, too! I already submitted those applications.
Some of those rules are hard to remember, so there are a lot of people that aren't sure what to do. It's hard to look down on someone's grammar skills if you don't know the correct way either. Is it all that important to look up?
ReplyDeleteCommas and semi-colons continue, and perhaps will forever be, the bane of my existence. The worst is that it's never consistent as to whether I'm using them enough or not. Bah. Sometimes I wish I lived in those early times before writing was invented. Those were the days...
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