Capitalization Conventions

There are many resources available that provide guidelines for various forms of capitalizing words in titles. When naming configuration items in the CMDB, the guidelines outlined for Works Cited Page: Basic Format in the Modern Language Association (MLA) Formatting & Style Guide should be applied. Given the number of resources and the sometimes conflicting information available, it's best to remember that a few general rules cover the majority of situations:

• The first letter of every word is capitalized except for ("a," "an," and "the"), ("for," "and," "nor," "but," "or," "yet," and "so"), and (words such as "on," "above," "below," "to," "throughout," etc.).
• Articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions are NOT capitalized.
• The first word is always capitalized, even if it is an article or preposition.
• All the letters in acronyms created by using the first letter of the words in a phrase (OIT, DNS, EEE, etc.) are capitalized.
• Pay particular attention to words that require "camel case" where a word is formed by combining all or parts of multiple words and the result uses both upper and lower case letters. (ServiceNow, ZotPortal, etc.) These frequently occur in third-party company names and the names of application software.
• Replace "and" with an ampersand (&) to reduce the length of the name.
• Never use a forward slash (/) in place of "or."
• Beware of exceptions to all these rules.

A great resource to observe how these rules are applied can be found on the TitleCap Web site. This is a utility that will accept any text string and title case it for you.

Examples

• Applicant Admission Status Conversion
• Transcript Clearing
• AUConvert
• eApp
• COBOL Batch Processing
• XNet Client Side Monitoring & Management
• EASIER Application System
• Transcript Scanning & Entry System
• Web-Based Reporting & Data Transmittal Services