The very last target for proofreading as you finalize your draft for submission is mechanics. In English composition, mechanics relates to typographic styles, such as the choice between UPPERCASE and lowercase letters, italics or boldface type and plain style, as well as using figures (e.g., 1, 2, 3) or written out numbers (e.g., one, two, three). Professionals follow stylistic conventions for mechanics much like they do for punctuation rules. If you don’t know these conventions, making them up as you go along may produce unprofessional-looking documents. Consider the following as your guide for how to get your writing mechanics right.

• Capitalizing
• Italicizing, Underlining, and Bolding
• Numbering

Capitalizing

One of the worst mistakes you can make in a high-priority document such as a cover letter is a glaring capitalization error like not capitalizing the first letter in a sentence or writing “im” or “ive” instead of “I am” or “I have.” These errors are fine when texting your friends, but when communicating with a hiring manager, the red flags they raise concerning the maturity and attention to detail that an applicant might lack could land that application in the shredder. At the other typographic extreme, those who use all-caps for anything other than abbreviations, as in “SEND ME THAT REPORT RIGHT NOW,” come off as hostile. In standardized writing, we use conventional combinations of capitals and lowercase letters meaningfully to guide our readers through our sentences. Let’s take a closer look at when to capitalize and when not to capitalize letters.

• What to Capitalize
• What Not to Capitalize
• Abbreviations

Proper Nouns

What Not to Capitalize

Don’t capitalize the following:

• Directions if they’re not in a geographical name; e.g., We drove east to North Bay, Ontario, from the Pacific Northwest
• Professional roles on their own without a name following (e.g. the prime minister) or if they follow the person’s name; e.g., Patrick Grant, professor of English
• Celestial bodies when used outside of the context of celestial bodies; e.g., He’s really down to earth. I love you to the moon and back. Here comes the sun.
• The seasons, despite the fact that the days of the week and months are capitalized (e.g., We’re heading south for the winter.) unless they’re part of a title (e.g., Fall 2019 semester)
• Century numbers, e.g., the nineteenth century
• Words that came from names or geographical regions, e.g., pasteurize, french fries, italics, Roman numerals, Arabic numerals
• Fields of study, e.g., history, biology, physics, economics, dentistry
• Some academic degrees, e.g., master’s degree, bachelor’s degree
• Citations at the page and line level: page 6, lines 23-27; p. 24, ll. 12-14

What to Look for When Proofreading

Pay close attention to the beginning of sentences, each point in a list, titles, and proper nouns. Depending on the conventions given above, determine whether you should capitalize or leave letters lowercase.

In the drafting process, you might delete the original capitalized opening to a sentence while trying out another style of sentence and forget to capitalize the new beginning. The proofreading stage is when you can catch glaring errors such as this. Also, the convention for geography is to capitalize directions only if they’re part of place names but not when they’re mere compass directions. Finally, capitalize professional titles only when they precede a name.

Texting habits die hard. A crucial step in standardized written English, however, is to correct informal spellings such as im so that they are changed to the more formal I am or even I’m, especially in job application documents. Be especially careful with capitalization around proprietary names such as software, which may include internal capitalization, as we see in PowerPoint or YouTube.

The titling convention is to capitalize major words but not short prepositions such as at. Since academic courses, institutions, and programs are proper nouns like the names of people, capitalize them all.

Abbreviations

Fully spell out abbreviations the first time you mention them and put the abbreviation in parentheses. For example, if you were to say, “The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) is reporting an above-average number of flu deaths this year,” subsequent mentions of the Agency can appear as simply “PHAC.” Institutions that are so common as names (proper nouns) in their abbreviated form (e.g., CNN, which stands for the “Cable News Network”) can be given as abbreviations unless introduced to an audience that wouldn’t know them. As you can see here, avoid adding periods after each uppercase letter in an abbreviation.

For more on capitalization, see the following resources:

• Purdue OWL’s A Little Help with Capitals page (Berry & Brizee)
• The Grammar Book’s Capitalization Rules page (Straus)
  

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Italicizing, Underlining, and Bolding

The standard typeface options of italics, bold, and underline allow writers to draw attention to their text in varying degrees. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage comes from overuse, which diminishes their impact. Taking advantage of their ability to draw the reader’s eye and communicate information beyond the words they express requires following certain conventional uses for each. We’ll start with the most meaningful in terms of the information it can convey.

As the typeface option that slants the top of each letter to the right, italic typeface performs several possible functions related to emphasizing words. Italics can also resolve ambiguities that would cause confusion without it.

Italicized Titles

When words are already italicized, such as a sentence under discussion or a book title within a book title, then de-italicize the title back into plain style (e.g., Vision in Shakespeare’s King Lear). Exceptions to the rule of italicizing books are holy texts such as the Bible and Koran, though specific editions should be italicized (e.g., The New American Standard Bible).

Underlining is normally an old-fashioned alternative to italicizing because it identified titles written on typewriters before modern word processors made italicization feasible. Today, underlining is mainly used to emphasize words within italicized titles or as an alternative to boldface type.

More than any other typeface, bold is best at emphasizing words because it draws the reader’s eyes more effectively than italics or underlining, especially for document titles and section headings. In casual emails, you can also use bold to highlight a main action point surrounded by plain-style text to ensure that the reader doesn’t miss it. Avoid bolding, underlining, italicizing, and using all caps in combination merely to lend added emphasis to words. Use whichever one is most appropriate in context.

For more on italics, underlining, and bolding, see the following resources:

• The chapter on Mechanics in Section 8 of this textbook
• Your Dictionary’s When to Italicize
• WikiHow’s How to Use Italics (Morgan)
• Butterick’s Practical Typography’s Bold or Italic (Butterick)
  

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Numbering

When do you spell out a number (e.g., ten), and when do you use a figure (e.g., 10)? What are the conventions for academic and professional situations? It depends on your purposes, but in routine formal situations and in APA style, spell out numbers from one to ten and use figures for 11 and up. In MLA, spell out any number if it’s only a word or two, but use figures for numbers that require three or more words. (Becker) In informal and technical writing, however, using only figures ensures accuracy, consistency, and brevity.

Formal Numbering Conventions for APA

What to Look for When Proofreading

Determine whether you should replace your spelled-out numbers with figures or vice versa according to the conventions given above.

In formal writing, spell out one- or two-word numbers rather than use figures lazily. However, feel free to use figures, no matter how small the number, in informal writing where concision matters most.

Though you should use a figure to represent a number above ten and spell out a number appearing at the beginning of a sentence, re-word the sentence if that number is more than two words.

Though the above correction sacrifices brevity, the gains in clarity can potentially prevent expensive miscommunication. The correction prevents the message recipients from misinterpreting the new meeting date as being May 4th and helps them pinpoint which date in their calendars to click and drag the original meeting from. Providing the days of the week also helps the recipients determine at a glance whether the new date conflicts with regularly scheduled weekly appointments.

Though “ninety” would be correct in some contexts (MLA style) because it is a one-word number, APA address conventions require you to use figures for address numbers and spell out numerical street/avenue numbers from the first to the tenth, then use figures from the 11th onward. Also, the English convention for representing the time of day is to use the twelve-hour clock, whereas the French convention is to use the twenty-four-hour clock.

Unless the age follows a person’s name as an appositive (e.g., Paul, 64, is losing his hair) or is part of a series that identifies several ages (e.g. a program for those of 4 to 6 years of age, with some 7-year-olds) or combines one person’s age in years and months, spell out ages up to one hundred.

Though normally, you would spell out two-word numbers, maintaining consistency with the related numbers in the series, which are figures here because they are over ten, takes precedence.

This looks at first as if all three of these are related numbers in a series and, therefore, must all be figures. The related-numbers convention applies to only the last two numbers (ages), however, whereas the first number is not an age, hence not part of the series. Since the first number can be spelled out as one word or two, it is not given as a figure.

To avoid “20 100-lb.” being misread as “20100-lb.,” bend the rule about using figures for numbers above ten to spell out the first of the consecutive numbers and use a figure for the second since it’s a weight. (If the first number were more than two words spelled out and the weight only one, however, “150 thirty-pound weights” would be preferable.)

Works Cited

Becker, David. “Comparing MLA and APA: Numbers.” APA Style, 26, June 2014, http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2014/06/comparing-mla-and-apa-numbers.html

Berry, Chris. “Writing numbers.” Purdue OWL, . 7 February, 2018, https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/grammar/writing_numbers.html

Berry, Chris., & Brizee, Allen. “A little help with capitals.” Purdue OWL, 12 July, 2013, https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/mechanics/help_with_capitals.html

Butterick, Matthew. “Bold or italic.” Butterick’s Practical Typography, 24 July, 2013, https://practicaltypography.com/bold-or-italic.html

Frost, Robert. “The number of Earth-like planets in the universe is staggering – here’s the math.” Forbes, 15 November 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/11/15/the-number-of-earth-like-planets-in-the-universe-is-staggering-heres-the-math/#5db6267f4932

Morgan, Megan. “How to use italics.” WikiHow, 23 May, 2015, https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Italics

Straus, Jane. “Capitalization rules.” The Grammar Book, 5 June 2015, https://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/capital.asp

Twain, Mark. The innocents abroad, or The new pilgrims’ progress. Vol. II. Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1989

“When to italicize.” Your Dictionary, 3 September 2009, http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/punctuation/when/when-to-italicize.html