{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://rednafi.com/zephyr/in-favor-of-sentence-case/",
  "description": "Embracing sentence case over title case in technical writing eliminates capitalization ambiguity and improves readability.",
  "path": "/zephyr/in-favor-of-sentence-case/",
  "publishedAt": "2022-03-26T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:fgtm2c26vfcj74rfmeggbyqj/site.standard.publication/3mnl6f7ob462z",
  "tags": [
    "Essay"
  ],
  "textContent": "Up until now, I've always preferred Title Case to demarcate titles and section headers\nin my writings. However, lately I've realized that each time I start writing a sentence, I\nwaste a few seconds deciding on the appropriate case of the special words like - technical\nterms, trademark names, proper nouns, etc - and how they'll blend in with the [multiple\nflavors of title capitalization] rules. Plus, often time, special casing of selected words\nmakes title-cased sentences look strange.\n\nThis led me to [asking a question on Twitter] to find out if anyone had the same thought as\nmine or if it'd be ignored as trifling pedantry. A few people responded and they had a few\nexcellent points on what they liked and disliked about title case. What surprised me that\nmajority of them preferred Sentence case where you'd only capitalize the first letter of\nthe first word of a sentence and then the capitilization of words would conform to the usual\ngrammatical rules. So instead of this:\n\n> Dataclasses in Python Eliminates Class Initialization Boilerplates.\n\nyou'd do this:\n\n> Dataclasses in Python eliminates class initialization boilerplates.\n\nThis allows me not to waste those few precious seconds thinking about the rules of upper\ncasing and whether or not sentences with technical words in them will look awkward. Also, it\nsaves me from creating horrors like this where the semantics of a sentence get massacred by\nthe eccentricity of title casing:\n\n![Screenshot showing awkward title case with technical terms creating semantic confusion][image_1]\n\n_Sentence case everywhere_ is the general trend I'm seeing on the technical blogs of some of\nthe big players on the internet:\n\n- [Django docs]\n- [Dropbox blog]\n- [GitHub blog]\n- [Twitter blog]\n- [GitLab blog]\n\nOne thing that I'll admit is, at first it just doesn't look right to me for a title to have\nsentence casing. Also, I'm not too conviced to adopt sentence case in technical papers.\nHowever, Robert Smallshire [argues for sentence case], noting that if it works for [the\nEconomist], it should work for most of us.\n\nSo, I'm kind of leaning towards sentence casing and have slowly started adopting it in my\nwritings everywhere. This blog used to conform to a mangled version of title casing to\ndelineate the titles and sub headers but I've converted all the posts to adopt sentence case\nfrom now on. I'm quite happy with the results so far and it's definitely one less thing to\nworry about.\n\n\n\n\n[multiple flavors of title capitalization]:\n    https://capitalizemytitle.com/\n\n[asking a question on Twitter]:\n    https://twitter.com/rednafi/status/1506949630587637762\n\n[argues for sentence case]:\n    https://twitter.com/robsmallshire/status/1506980088532905998\n\n[the Economist]:\n    https://www.economist.com/\n\n[django docs]:\n    https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/\n\n[dropbox blog]:\n    https://dropbox.tech\n\n[github blog]:\n    https://github.blog\n\n[twitter blog]:\n    https://blog.twitter.com\n\n[gitlab blog]:\n    https://about.gitlab.com/blog/\n\n[image_1]:\n    https://blob.rednafi.com/static/images/in_favor_of_sentence_case/img_1.png",
  "title": "In favor of sentence case"
}