Editing Capitals in Time

Capitalization is one of those tricky editing/style issues that constantly dog writers. Worse yet, you can be writing along, going with the flow, and suddenly a little doubt creeps in: should that be capitalized? If you stop to look it up, you risk getting side-tracked and experiencing a temporary interruption of creativity. Well, maybe it's not as bad as jarring yourself into a Writer's Block, but you know what I mean -- the creativity runs out of one side of your brain, the analytic editing mode comes from the other side.

Suggestion: When it's flowing, keep on going. Edit later to make it greater.

Another time aspect to editing is dealing with which elements to capitalize. The following guidelines are adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style that I've already blogged on earlier this week. Here's the skinny on capping time: always use the caps on archaeological periods (the Iron Age) and traditional ones like the Renaissance, but never capitalize the names of decades, centuries, or other eras unless they include capitalized adjectives like the Victorian times (an era named for the English queen Victoria).

Some writers zip through their manuscripts, editing for everything at once. I think this apparent time saver leads to overlooked mistakes. At the least, make one pass for the punctuation and capitalization alone. When I'm working with copy that includes many opportunities for capitalization errors, one of the times I scan it is only for those problems.