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Sentence basics

Using the correct verb with a subject

Pronouns - singular or plural two

Compounded and non-compounded subjects

Pairs of things

Quantity describing expressions

Expletive constructions

Abbreviations

I.e. versus e.g

Mr and Mrs Smith

Date and time abbreviations

Name initials

Abbreviations of units

Avoiding sentence fragments

When its OK to use sentence fragments

Capitalisation

Proper nouns

The first word of any sentence

Capitalisation of titles

I gets capitalised

Using italics

To make something stand out

Onomatopoeia

Titles

When you are talking about the word itself not using it for what it represents

Names of vehicles

Short sentences

Joining parallel sentence subjects or objects

Compounding parallel objects

Compounding parallel subjects

Linking two sentences together more closely

The simple linking relationship

The contrast relationship

Intentionally subordinating a clause to another

Connecting using an absolute phrase

Connecting using appositive phrases

Connecting using a participial phrase

Using the correct sequence of tenses

Writing numbers correctly

Numbers of units

Decimal and fractional numbers

The number zero

Approximate numbers

Common phrases

Starts of sentences

Multiple numbers one after the other

Writing lists

Lists

Bullet point lists

Numbered lists

Capitalisation of titles

Usually in a title you capitalise all the ‘big’ and ‘important’ words, but leave the conjunctions, articles and prepositions as lower case. You also need to capitalise the first word in a title, regardless of what type of word it is.

The underlined words are the ‘unimportant’ words that don’t need to be capitalised. ‘Into’ and ‘in’ are both prepositions. More recently, to make titles more ‘visually attractive’, using minimal capitalisation is becoming more common. For these two titles, using minimal capitalisation you only capitalise words that would be capitalised in a normal sentence:

Sometimes these rules won’t hold fast. Often we break the rules when we want to make something look a little better.

Jason’s Journey to Run a Marathon

The ‘to Run’ is an infinitive verb. It looks a little strange to have one of the words in the infinitive in lower case and the other in upper case. We can make it look better by capitalising both words, even though ‘to’ is normally an ‘unimportant’ word that doesn’t deserve to be capitalised:

Jason’s Journey To Run a Marathon

Click here to move on to the next topic: I gets capitalised