I did not mean to make this a big issue, but thanks for taking the time
to explain the decision.
I certainly did not mean to imply that traditional titles are easy. I
have five dictionaries and three
style guides, and I use them all the time (or I used to when I was the
manager of a 14 member
doc group, and consistency was critical).
Now that I'm semi-retired and living in Puerto Rico, I'm down to just CMS
and Strunk and White.
I'm currently reviewing a chapter with your style, and it works very
well.
By the way, the closest thing I have to the bible is The Five Books
of Moses, the Everett Fox
translation, and he uses all caps for titles. Yuck.
Thanks,
Lou
Janet M. Swisher wrote:
Jean
Hollis Weber wrote:
Lou Iorio wrote:
I can certainly live with your rules; I was
simply looking for justification. I have seen none yet.
I am sure that when Janet Swisher gets to work on Monday (assuming she
hasn't taken the week off for Thanksgiving), she will be able to find
the authoritative sources we referred to when making our decisions
about things like capitalisation.
As I said earlier, I'm not at home where my reference books are. (And I
won't be there until early December.) Otherwise I would have pointed to
them immediately.
I'm not sure precisely what source we referred to in making that
specific decision. (It might have been Hentzenwerke, since Jean has
published with them, and she let us reuse some of her content.) I think
the primary consideration was ease of application of the rule. We
wanted to have as few rules as possible and to keep them as simple as
possible, while still achieving a modicum of consistency. (For a while,
we tried to keep the /OOo Style Guide/ to 2 pages so it would print on
a single sheet, but that didn't last.)
We wanted simplicity because we are all volunteers here, and most of
our writers and reviewers are not professionals (in those roles). I'm a
professional writer and editor, and nonetheless, I keep a tape flag on
section 8.167 of /CMS/ because I can never remember all the rules for
headline style capitalization. (E.g., "Lowercase prepositions,
regardless of length, except when they are stressed ..., are used
adverbially or adjectivally ..., are used as conjunctions ..., or are
part of a Latin _expression_ used adverbially or adjectivally ...." --
phew! -- This conflicts with many other sources, which say to
capitalize prepositions longer than 4 characters.)
As Daniel said, our volunteers' time is much better spent on improving
content than on trying to decide whether to capitalize "through". While
the /CMS/ is about the closest thing I have to a Bible, I still
exercise judgement in following its commandments. In this case,
practicality won out.
However, for a style guide that endorses sentence-style headings, try
/Xerox Publishing Standards/, published in 1988. (If not old enough to
be a dinosaur, it is at least pre-Web, and is the granddaddy of a
number of corporate technical documentation style guides I've used.) It
dictates headline style only for document titles, and "downstyle" for
essentially every other kind of heading or caption.
The /Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications/ gives rules
for headline capitalization, but concedes "Many books and Help topics
now capitalize only the first word of chapter titles and other
headings; design guidelines are less formal than in the past. ... If
your design does not use traditional capitalization, follow your design
guidelines."
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