Capitalization rules help writers show which words are names, titles, beginnings, and special terms. This cheat sheet gives students a quick reference for the most common capitalization situations in school writing. Students in grades 3-8 can use it to edit sentences, paragraphs, stories, reports, and essays.
Clear rules and examples make writing easier to read and more correct.
Key Facts
- Capitalize the first word of every sentence, such as The dog ran across the yard.
- Capitalize the pronoun I wherever it appears in a sentence, such as Maya and I finished the project.
- Capitalize proper nouns, including specific names of people, places, schools, teams, and organizations, such as Jordan, Texas, Lincoln Middle School, and NASA.
- Capitalize days, months, and holidays, such as Monday, October, Thanksgiving, and New Year's Day.
- Capitalize important words in titles, including the first word, last word, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
- Capitalize the first word of a direct quotation when the quoted words form a complete sentence, such as Maria said, "Please close the door."
- Capitalize family titles when they are used as names, such as I asked Mom for help, but do not capitalize them when they follow a possessive word, such as my mom helped me.
- Capitalize historical events, periods, documents, and special groups, such as the Civil War, the Renaissance, the Constitution, and the Cherokee Nation.
Vocabulary
- Capital letter
- A capital letter is the uppercase form of a letter, such as A instead of a.
- Proper noun
- A proper noun is the specific name of a person, place, thing, or organization.
- Common noun
- A common noun names a general person, place, thing, or idea and is not usually capitalized.
- Title
- A title is the name of a book, story, poem, movie, song, article, or other work.
- Direct quotation
- A direct quotation gives a speaker's exact words and is usually placed inside quotation marks.
- Possessive word
- A possessive word shows ownership or relationship, such as my, your, his, her, our, or their.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Capitalizing every important-looking word in a sentence is wrong because only sentence beginnings, proper nouns, titles, and special cases need capital letters.
- Forgetting to capitalize I is wrong because the pronoun I is always capitalized, even when it appears in the middle or at the end of a sentence.
- Capitalizing common nouns like school, city, or teacher is wrong unless they are part of a specific name, such as Eastview School or New York City.
- Leaving days, months, and holidays lowercase is wrong because names of calendar days, months, and holidays are proper nouns.
- Capitalizing small title words like a, an, the, of, and in every time is often wrong because short articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are usually lowercase unless they are the first or last word of a title.
Practice Questions
- 1 Rewrite this sentence with correct capitalization: on friday, mia and i visited the denver museum of nature and science.
- 2 Rewrite this sentence with correct capitalization: my favorite book is charlotte's web, and my brother likes the wild robot.
- 3 Choose the correctly capitalized sentence: A. We saw uncle Joe in june. B. We saw Uncle Joe in June. C. We saw uncle joe in June.
- 4 Explain why the word mother is capitalized in I asked Mother for a ride but not in I asked my mother for a ride.