Is there a definitive answer to this capitalization conundrum?

Posted on July 9, 2014 by kennethcarnesi — Leave a comment

While trying to answer co-worker’s question last week, I unearthed a contentious capitalization conundrum. (Try saying that 10 times fast.) And much like the wrangling over the serial comma, or for that matter, capitalization, this debate does not appear to have an easy answer.

The question: do you capitalize a lowercase brand name if the brand name is used at the beginning of a sentence? Here are a couple examples:

eBay has a fabulous collection of vintage tube tops.
iTunes must now compete with Amazon’s Prime Music.

The Chicago Manual of Style has this to say: “Brand names or names of companies that are spelled with a lowercase initial letter followed by a capital letter (eBay, iPod, iPhone, etc.) need not be capitalized at the beginning of a sentence or heading, though some editors may prefer to reword.”

That wasn’t always its rule, though….

Source: www.prdaily.com

This column will change your life: how to think about writing

Posted on July 7, 2014 by kennethcarnesi — Leave a comment

The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is “cognitively unnatural.” For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You can’t see your readers’ facial expressions. They can’t ask for clarification. Often, you don’t know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this?

Pinker’s answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach “joint attention”. Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else’s attention to something visible.

Source: www.theguardian.com