The case for headlines

What with war, famine, AIDS and global warming, few of us have the time or inclination to worry about capitalization rules. But we're a hardy and stubborn few, as the news crew discovered when I opened a local front in the great headline format debate. Until a few days ago, NCPR Online had followed the headline capitalization conventions used by NPR Online--A Variation of "Title Case" Promulgated by the AP Style Manual. Most newspaper sites and some other online news sites use title case--and it does make everything sound Very Important--but the rules change from stylebook to stylebook. Some capitalize all verbs, some capitalize all verbs except forms of "to be." Some use lower case for all prepositions, some capitalize longer prepositions, such as "beneath." And further picayunities proceed from there. Trying to convey the nuances of title case to radio reporters who, if they really got off on this stuff would probably be print reporters instead, was-uh-problematical. There was some enthusiasm for the suggestion that we just capitalize everything, like text messaging, except upside-down.

Fortunately, there is a perfectly respectable alternative, "sentence case," that is used by many news organizations in the English-speaking world including CBC, BBC and CNN, and that is also used by the foreign-language press and by most bloggers. In sentence case you capitalize as you would in a sentence: first word, proper nouns and acronyms, period. (Well--actually you omit the period in headlines.) So that will be the new NCPR headline standard--Except If We Forget. I rest my case.