Editing Letter case (section)

=== Headings and publication titles ===
In English-language publications, various conventions are used for the capitalisation of words in [[Title (publishing)|publication title]]s and [[headline]]s, including chapter and section headings. The rules differ substantially between individual house styles.

The convention followed by many British [[publisher]]s (including scientific publishers like ''[[Nature (journal)|Nature]]'' and ''[[New Scientist]]'', magazines like ''[[The Economist]]'', and newspapers like ''[[The Guardian]]'' and ''[[The Times]]'') and many U.S. newspapers is sentence-style capitalisation in headlines, i.e. capitalisation follows the same rules that apply for sentences. This convention is usually called ''sentence case''. It may also be applied to publication titles, especially in bibliographic references and library catalogues. An example of a global publisher whose English-language house style prescribes sentence-case titles and headings is the [[International Organization for Standardization]] (ISO).{{Citation needed|date=June 2024}}

For publication titles it is, however, a common typographic practice among both British<ref name="Guardian" /> and U.S. publishers to capitalise significant words (and in the United States, this is often applied to headings, too). This family of typographic conventions is usually called ''[[title case]]''. For example, R.&nbsp;M. Ritter's ''Oxford Manual of Style'' (2002) suggests capitalising "the first word and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, but generally not articles, conjunctions and short prepositions".<ref name="Ritter 2002" /> This is an old form of [[Emphasis (typography)|emphasis]], similar to the more modern practice of using a larger or boldface font for titles. The rules which prescribe which words to capitalise are not based on any grammatically inherent correct&ndash;incorrect distinction and are not universally standardised; they differ between style guides, although most style guides tend to follow a few strong conventions, as follows:
* Most styles capitalise all words except for short [[Closed class|closed-class]] words (certain [[Part of speech|parts of speech]], namely, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions); but the first word (always) and last word (in many styles) are also capitalised, regardless of their part of speech. Many styles capitalise longer prepositions such as "between" and "throughout", but not shorter ones such as "for" and "with".<ref name="Berdine" /> Typically, a preposition is considered short if it has up to three or four letters.
* A few styles capitalise all words in title case (the so-called ''start case''), which has the advantage of being easy to implement and hard to get "wrong" (that is, "not edited to style"). Because of this rule's simplicity, software [[#Case folding|case-folding]] routines can handle 95% or more of the editing, especially if they are programmed for desired exceptions (such as "FBI" rather than "Fbi").
* As for whether hyphenated words are capitalised not only at the beginning but also after the hyphen, there is no universal standard; variation occurs [[Linguistic description|in the wild]] and among house styles (e.g., "The Letter-''C''ase Rule in My Book"; "Short-''t''erm Follow-''u''p Care for Burns"). Traditional copyediting makes a distinction between ''temporary compounds'' (such as many [[Nonce word|nonce]] [novel instance] [[compound modifier]]s), in which every part of the hyphenated word is capitalised (e.g. "How This Particular Author Chose to Style His ''A''utumn-''A''pple-''P''icking Heading"), and ''permanent compounds'', which are terms that, although compound and hyphenated, are so well established that dictionaries enter them as [[headword]]s (e.g., "Short-''t''erm Follow-''u''p Care for Burns").

Title case is widely used in many English-language publications, especially in the United States. However, its conventions are sometimes not followed strictly{{Snd}}especially in informal writing.

In creative typography, such as music record covers and other artistic material, all styles are commonly encountered, including all-lowercase letters and special case styles, such as [[studly caps]] (see below). For example, in the [[wordmark]]s of video games it is not uncommon to use stylised upper-case letters at the beginning and end of a title, with the intermediate letters in small caps or lower case (e.g., [[Arcania: Gothic 4|{{smallcaps|ArcaniA}}]], [[ARMA: Armed Assault|{{smallcaps|ArmA}}]], and [[DmC: Devil May Cry|DmC]]).