{ a bit of Friday afternoon geekery. }

[delga]

So, my grammar usage is pretty good. I throw a bit of a hissyfit when it comes to things like the Oxford comma, and I've got apostrophes down, yo. But. BUT. Dude, I hate capitalising titles. I get so frustrated. I know you don't capitalise articles. Except when you do.

Anyway, I was just skimming through the style guide the university uses with regards to all submitted work and other than realising that I've been using quote marks incorrectly my whole academic career (single quotes, seriously? What. the. fuck.) I've finally found a definitive rule for title capitalisation. Woo! (No, really: WOO! This makes me Very Happy.) And now I'm going to share. Aren't I lovely? Yes, I know.

edited because of copyright issues that I'd rather not deal with.

YAY: initial letter of first word; nouns; pronouns; adjectives; verbs; adverbs; subordinating conjunctions

NAY: articles; possessive determiners ('my'); prepositions; 'that'; 'and'; 'but'; 'or'; 'nor'

The above? SO USEFUL. You have no idea.

--

Now to work out how to change all the quote marks in my Word file in one swoop (as opposed to doing it manually). Find and replace is good for words, but not so much for punctuation. Or is it? I've never tried it. I'm pretty certain I can change the quotes using the style function but heck if I can work that out.

Did I mention that I actually have to stop faffing and finish writing this? Because: yes.

Comments

[tigertrapped.livejournal.com]

Changing double quotes to singles is easy. Just search and replace all " with '. But if you have to change singles to doubles it's a pain because it picks up all inverted commas such as it's etc and makes them doubles too. *sigh*

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Ah, so that does work, then? Excellent, that makes life much easier. Thank you!

[general-jinjur.livejournal.com]

i hate trying to figure out titles. i use apa style for titles in citations, which i love, because you only capitalize the first word and proper nouns. easy!

this is great as a standard, though - thank you. invaluable.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the above is from the MHRA style guide - the APA is much easier!

I spend ages agonising over whether my "a/an"s should be capitalised. Apparently not?

[raucousraven.livejournal.com]

Really? No possessive determiners? Huh. Although that does fit with my "three letters or less = likely non-caps" suggestion of thumb when it comes to such formatting things.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

According to the MHRA. Which is the standard that I have to write to. That one surprised me, too, though. ('Molly and my Pet Dog' looks weird.) (Not a real title, lols.)