The Turner Ink blog contains rants, bloopers, observations and opinions. It also has handy tips on grammar and punctuation such as colons: semicolons; and full stops. As well as some very useful ‘how tos’. Feel free to leave comments. Be nice though.

Turner Ink

Copywriting Services London

Posts tagged 'capital letters'

Turner Ink Christmas card bloopers – the answers

23rd
Dec
by Sarah Turner

Old Typewriter smallSo for those of you that received a Turner Ink Xmas card this year, these are the bloopers. How many did you get?

 

A Christmas tail [A classic homonym. It should be tale.]

Santa was having a bad day. 4 [up to number 10, spell out the number. So Four] of his elfs [elves] were throwing a sickie and the work experience elves werent [don't forget the apostrophe, weren't] producing toys fast enough. Santa was beginning to feel the pressure.

His blog needed updating. He hadn’t checked twitter [brand name, so Twitter] for at least 20 minites [minutes]. And people were giving him greif [grief] on Facebook.

Than [then], as he began to load his slay [another homonym, sleigh] one of the boards broke. And several large bags from Amazon fell to the ground: [a comma here not a colon] scattering their contents all over the place. Needless to say, santa [Cap S, Santa] was not in the best of moods.

Suddenly, the doorbell rang and he went to the door expecting another problem. But when he opened it; [comma here not a semicolon] there was just a little angle [like 18 degrees? Geddit? Yes, it should be angel of course] with a great big christmas [Christmas] tree.

The angel greeted him very cheerfully: [So lots of newspapers and mags have a colon to introduce speech. It's not needed though. A comma would suffice.]  “Merry Christmas Santa claus [cap C, Claus]. Isn’t it just a wonderful day [question mark needed]. I have a beautiful tree for you. See, isn’t its [it] just the loveliest Christmas Tree [lower case t, tree] you’ve ever seen? Where would you like me to put it?’ [You started with double speech marks, you need to end with double speech marks.]

And that’s how the angel on top of the Christmas tree tradition began.

Hands up who circled the And and But at the beginning of a sentence as an error? Back of the class!

Happy Christmas anyway.


Capital Punishment: When to use (and not use) capital letters

28th
Jun
by Sarah Turner

The other day I asked my nephew what the capital of France is. He replied ‘F’.

Yep, most of us know that capital letters are used for proper nouns and at the beginning of a sentence. But take a quick look at the intertubes and you’ll discover that the misuse of capital letters is now reaching epidemic proportions.

So here’s a handy capital letters checklist.

Use capital letters for:

The first letter of a sentence: It was there
Days of the week and months:  Monday, July
Personal pronoun: I
Proper names: Sarah, London, River Thames
Brand names: Microsoft, Sony
Countries: England, Australia
Languages: French, German
Job titles if the title comes before a name: Vice-President Jeff Atkins
Salutations: Dear Sir
Acronyms and abbreviations: BBC, UN
Holidays and festivals: Christmas, Easter
In titles of books and films: Confessions of a Shopaholic, Crime and Punishment
When you’re shouting: HOW HAS THIS HAPPENED?

In the US capital letters are used for every word in a heading apart from prepositions (to, over), conjunctions (and, but) and articles a and the: The Simple Power of a Killer Offer. Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself.

Capital letters should also be used in Page Titles and PPC ads.
 
Page Title with capital letters 

 

Punctuation Grammar Ebook
Stuck on Comma Use? Confused by
Tenses? Buy this Ebook Now £6.99
www.turnerink.co.uk/ebook 

 

But don’t use capital letters for:

The seasons: summer, winter
When a country appears as part of a well-known phrase: danish pastries, french windows, english muffins
Relatives: mum, dad, aunt (unless they’re my Mum, my Dad or my Aunt)
Compass points: Drive east on the A3, he lived on the north coast of France
Job titles if it comes after a name: David Cameron, the British prime minister, is due to meet with Barack Obama this afternoon

So how about online stuff? (For the record online is lower case and all one word.) Purists write Web and Internet with capital letters but web and internet are now widely used. So just pick one style and stick to it. The word website is lower case as is email. But the jury is still out on Ebooks and Enewsletters and you’ll see them written with upper and lower cases.

Agree or disagree with any of the above? Let us know in the comments.


 

Definition of a blog: A blog or web blog is a website usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. (Wikipedia.com)