What do I capitalise in a heading?

Increasingly there is a tendency towards less clutter in our writing - and that includes punctuation and formatting. Headings or titles are affected by this and it is becoming more common to see headings capitalised using sentence case (that is, only the first letter in the sentence and proper nouns have a capital). Life is much easier for us when we use sentence case because then we don't have to ask that tricky question: what words need a capital letter in my heading? Nevertheless some titles still require capitalisation and there is no getting out of it (book titles and report headings, for example). There is no definitive answer that I can give you to the capitalisation question, but I can give you some guidelines.

Do use a capital letter for:

• the first and last words of the title or heading
• all nouns and pronouns (e.g. he, she, you, it, Frankfurt, pony, forecast)
• all verbs (e.g. goes, falls, have, is)
• all adjectives (e.g. pretty, grand, fantastic, miniature)
• all adverbs (e.g. quickly, smoothly, finally)
• the word that in whatever role it has in the sentence
• longer conjunctions (e.g. since, because, although)
• longer prepositions (e.g. around, between, through)
• the first word following a colon and, if you wish, the first letter following a hyphen or dash.

Don't use a capital letter for:

• definite or indefinite articles (i.e. a, an, the)
• shorter conjunctions (e.g. nor, or, for, and, but)
• the words as and to wherever you might find them in the sentence
• shorter prepositions (e.g. in, out, over, on)

This is a nice set of guidelines and I acknowledge K. D. Sullivan and Merilee Eggleston for this succinct list. However there are a couple of riders that all reference books on the subject add.

1. Capitalisation of headings can be tricky if you don't know what part of the sentence the word is. Take a look in a dictionary if you don't know. If in doubt, follow your gut instinct - type the heading with and without the capital and see which way looks best to you.
2. Think of the significance of the word in the heading or title. Generally speaking the word should be capitalised if it is important to the understanding of the title.

As with so much of the English language capitalisation can be a matter of preference, but with the guidelines above you will be able to capitalise most titles and headings with confidence.