Ashley Campbell's Writer's Log
Capital punishment
Call me old-fashioned, but I’m kind of wedded to the idea that correct punctuation makes life easier. And incorrect punctuation deserves the death penalty.
Well, no I’m not that harsh. That’s not the kind of capital punishment I was talking about. But I do get hot under the collar about the obsessive use of Capital Letters for any word that the writer thinks might be Important.
Take job titles. Why does every General Manager of Sanitary Supplies warrant capital letters? The easy answer is that they don’t, but it makes them feel Very Important.
But it also slows down the reader, and devalues the use of capitals for genuine emphasis and to denote true rarity and rank — Pope, Queen, Prime Minister, President, Attorney-General and so on. Cap them up, but chief executives, general managers and senior sanitation engineers are not in the same league.
©Ashley Campbell, 2009
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