Capitalisation Rules

Based on Azar, B. (2003) Fundamentals of English Grammar, 3rd Edition. Longman.

There are four rules for capitalisation.

Rule Details Examples
1.     Writing Start each sentence with a capital letter. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs. Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
2.     Proper nouns
  1. Names of people
  2. Titles of people
  3. Time (days, months, holidays)
  4. Place names
  5. Names of institutions
  6. Names of companies
  7. Names of books, movies, etc
  8. Names of countries & languages
  9. Names of religions
  1. He’s Andrew Blyth.
  2. He’s Mr. Blyth.
  3. Today is Thursday, 3rd of December, 2015.
  4. I live in Nagoya.
  5. I’m at Nanzan University now.
  6. I work for Sony.
  7. I like to read English Grammar In Use every day.
  8. My teacher is British, and he speak English and Korean.
  9. I follow Buddism.
3.     First person pronouns The pronoun “I” (as in ‘me’) is always capitalised.

Dialogues use A & B

 You know, I like to eat bananas everyday.
4.     Shouting Use this to represent loud or angry voices in dialogues and stories. Never in formal writing. A: What did you say?

B: I said, NEVER do that again!

A: Oh, sorry. Don’t get angry!

Fix these common errors students make.

  1. There are many foods that i like, including apples and bananas.
  2. it would be nice to get a job in apple. it would be really cool.
  3. john says that mr. blyth is really cool.
  4. hikaru utada says that andrew is really handsome.
  5. i want to get a TOYOTA prius by this december.
  6. Have you ever read lord of the rings? it’s a really cool book.
  7. Kumi koda will get andrew a present for his birthday next monday.
  8. atsuko maeda will take mr. blyth on a dinner date to tokyo next thursday night.
  9. mayu watanabe asked if andrew speaks american or english english.
  10. many people say that wombats are the cutest animals in australia.