Capitalisation and case

Capital letters

Limit your use of capitalisation. ‘All caps’ is sometimes used to emphasise a word or a short phrase, but a block of uppercase letters is harder to read. They can also make your writing look strident and unfriendly.

For headings, use sentence case (where only the first word begins with a capital letter), unless the heading hierarchy requires a heading in block capitals.

For proper nouns, use title case (where each word begins with a capital letter).

Write

Pathways to Curtin University

Don’t write

PATHWAYS TO CURTIN UNIVERSITY

Earth, moon and Sun

Earth is capitalised when used in a planetary context and lowercase when used as a synonym for soil. Earth sciences, which relates to the study of our planet, has a capital E.

When referring to moons in general, moon is lowercase, but when referring to Earth’s moon (the Moon) it should be capitalised. The names of stars, including our closest star, the Sun, are
capitalised.

Examples

  • Earth has one moon, known only as the Moon.
  • Curtin has particular strength in Earth sciences research.

Geographic and geopolitical terms

Capitalise the names of geographic areas with formal boundaries, or that designate a group of nations or regions geographically or politically.

Examples

  • Southern Hemisphere
  • South-East Asia
  • Central America
  • the Balkans
  • the South West region
  • South Pacific
  • the Wheatbelt
  • Use lower case for general geographical entities.

Examples

  • northern Australia
  • south-east zone
  • south-western Australia
  • the eastern states

Headings

Write headings in sentence case without full stops.

Use a consistent grammatical form for each level of heading. Two common forms for headings are noun phrases (for example, Research centres) and instructions (for example, Proofread before publishing).

School years

Don’t capitalise the word year when referring to a year group.

Example

In June, year 11 students from several Perth secondary schools will visit Curtin Malaysia.

Note that while secondary school is the formal term, it is usually fine to use the more informal term high school.

Scientific names

Do not capitalise or italicise scientific names that have become common names, unless in formal scientific descriptions.

Examples

  • amoeba
  • eucalyptus

Semesters

In a sentence, use first semester and second semester rather than semester 1 and semester 2. In tables, use semester 1 and semester 2.

Example

You’ll complete five assignments in first semester and three assignments in second semester.

World wars

Spell out the number of the war and use initial capitals for each word.

Example

First World War, Second World War

When making repeated references to the world wars, write them out in full the first time you use them and include the shortened form in parentheses throughout the rest of the content.

Example

The Second World War (WW2) started in 1939. More than 27,000 Australians died during WW2.