4. Paragraph Breaks

How you choose to separate your paragraphs will depend on your personal preferences and whether you are writing fiction or certain kinds of non-fiction. Don’t make the awful mistake of mixing styles – I’ve seen it often enough and, believe me, it looks truly dreadful.

You’ll see in this short article that paragraphs are separated by a line space. This is quite normal in a brief ‘how-to’ work such as this. When there are lots of separate points that your reader will want to access and remember, separating paragraphs with line spaces makes sense: points and examples stand out and are easily found again.

• If you are writing a short guide like this one, I recommend separating paragraphs with a line space. It doesn’t matter what you are writing about.

You’ll find that lots of textbooks, cookbooks, manuals and so forth also use spaced paragraphs, for exactly the same reasons.

• For other kinds of non-fiction (e.g. biographies, histories, collections of essays), the convention is to close up paragraphs (no line spaces) and instead indent the first line of each new paragraph.

• For fiction, the convention is also simply to close up paragraphs and indent the first line of each new paragraph.

When you indent the first line of each paragraph, make it consistent. There are few things more annoying for a reader than inconsistent indents, especially those itty-bitty indents where you’re not sure if it really is a new paragraph or not.

• If using UK style, don’t indent the first line of the first paragraph under a heading.

Summary

• Decide on spaces or indents and stick with them.

• Your decision will partly depend on the kind of book you are writing. If in doubt, look at what the majority of professionally produced books are using. It would be silly to select a style that no one else in your market uses.

5. Capitalization

A lot of completely unnecessary capital letters can make your writing look ridiculous (if you don’t believe me, take a look at the section on emphasis in the previous article). Remember that lots of capital letters are very distracting in print and are tiring to read. You don’t want to tire your readers or make them think you’re ridiculous, so use capital letters sparingly. Decide which words you want to capitalize and stick with your choice.

What Do You Capitalize?

Here are some simple guidelines for when to use an initial capital letter:

• initial letters of sentences (of course!)

• names of people, places and related words (e.g. Shakespeare, Stratford, Shakespearean)

• languages and nationalities (e.g. German, Australian)

• days of the week and months of the year (no need to give examples of these, surely!)

• titles of laws, plans, wars, treaties, legal cases (e.g. Marshall Plan, Treaty of London)

• specific institutions and other organizations (e.g. University of Chicago, the United Nations)

• specific titles and ranks (e.g. General Eisenhower; Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria)

• religions and religious holidays (e.g. Christianity, Islam, Hanukkah)

• significant days (e.g. Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve)

• unique events and periods in history (e.g. the Holocaust, the Dark Ages)

What Don’t You Need to Capitalize?

• seasons of the year (e.g. spring)

• centuries (e.g. 20th century)

• university (in general references, e.g. university department)

• government (e.g. the Attlee government, government policies)

Proper nouns (nearly) always start with a capital letter. These days, however, with technologies in particular, there are some exceptions, e.g. iPhone, eBay.

White and Black may be capitalized as ethnic labels, but this is a matter of personal/political choice.

The use of a capital after a colon (:) depends on whether you’re writing in UK or US English. You should generally use a capital letter after a colon with US spelling but not with UK spelling.

Summary

• Use capitalization sparingly.

• Decide on a style and stick to it.

• If in doubt, use a dictionary or consult another source on your specialist subject.