Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Capitalization
Capital letters were once used more liberally than they are now; in the eighteenth
century writers commonly used capitalization (that is, an initial capital letter) to
denote nouns. Today, only proper names are capitalized, and even these can be in
lowercase if the name is in common use; for example, the capitals in the phrase “the
Extensible Hashing method” should be in lowercase.
Some names are not consistently capitalized, particularly those of programming
languages. Acronyms that cannot be sounded, such as “APL”, should always be
written that way, but the only general rule for other cases is to follow other authors.
For example, both of the names “FORTRAN” and “Prolog” are abbreviations derived
from truncated words. These are however proper names and should always have an
initial capital; “lisp” and “pascal” are incorrect.
In technical writing it is usual to capitalize names such as “Theorem 3.1”,
“Figure 4”, and “Section 11”. In other writing, lowercase is preferred, but in technical
writing lowercase looks sloppy to some readers.
Headings can be either minimally or maximally capitalized. In the former, words
are capitalized as they would be in normal text, except that the word following a
colon is capitalized.
The use of jump statements: Advice for Prolog programmers
In the latter, words other than articles, conjunctions, or prepositions are capitalized;
even these may be capitalized if they are over three letters long.
The Use of Jump Statements: Advice for Prolog Programmers
The same rules apply to captions and titles of references.
Be consistent in your style of capitalization. It is acceptable to use maximum
capitalization for sections and minimum capitalization for subsections, but not the
other way around.
Quotations
One convention for quotations is that some punctuation marks are placed inside the
quotation even when they are not part of the original material. An alternative is to
place a punctuationmark within the quotation only if it was used in the original text—
such as when a complete sentence is being quoted—as is done throughout this topic.
Crosley (2000) argues that “open sets are of insufficient power”, but
Davies (2002) disagrees: “If a concept is interesting, open sets can express it.”
