Long-form on case.
Twenty original essays on style-guide rules, programming naming conventions, the history of title case, and the typography of titles. Written for editors and developers who care about getting the details right.
Accessibility and Text Case for Screen Readers
Most writers think of text case as a visual choice. For users of screen readers and other assistive technology, capitalization choices have audible consequences. Here's what every writer should know.
Read article →Why iPhone, GraphQL, and eBay Are Capitalized That Way
iPhone, eBay, GraphQL, PostgreSQL. These names break the basic English rule that proper nouns start with a capital letter. They're common enough now that we don't notice — but they're a recent phenomenon, and the choices behind them are deliberate.
Read article →Typography and Readability: Why Title Case Works
Reading is a measurable activity, and typographers have spent decades testing what makes text easy or hard to read. Title case has some real advantages over alternatives — and some real downsides that explain why it's falling out of fashion in some contexts.
Read article →The History of Title Case in English Publishing
Title case looks like a fixed convention, but it's actually a recent invention by the standards of English writing. Its rules emerged piecemeal from printers, publishers, and newsroom editors over the last few centuries — and they're still changing.
Read article →Environment Variable Naming Conventions (CONSTANT_CASE and Beyond)
Environment variables are how applications find their secrets, their database URLs, and their feature flags. Naming them well makes deployments predictable; naming them poorly turns every new environment into a small archeological dig.
Read article →How to Name React Components (PascalCase and File Conventions)
React components have one inviolable convention — PascalCase for the component name itself — and several team-by-team conventions for file naming, folder structure, and prop naming. Here's a tour of what works.
Read article →CSS Class Naming Conventions: BEM, kebab-case, and Beyond
CSS class names are public API. They appear in your HTML, in browser dev tools, and in every team member's muscle memory. The naming convention you pick affects how easy your stylesheets are to maintain — and how easy your team finds it to work together.
Read article →How to Create SEO-Friendly URL Slugs (Rules and Examples)
A URL slug is the human-readable identifier in a URL — the part that comes after the domain and before any query strings. Good slugs help SEO, look better in shares, and give clues about page content. Bad slugs hurt all three.
Read article →How to Name Database Columns (Conventions and Anti-Patterns)
Database column names outlive the code that queries them. A name chosen carelessly on Monday becomes a name you're still using ten years later. Here's how to choose well.
Read article →Naming Conventions in 20 Programming Languages
When you move between programming languages, the naming conventions are one of the small frictions that slows you down. Here's a side-by-side reference for the 20 languages most developers encounter, with the why behind each convention.
Read article →Why HTMLParser Becomes html_parser, Not h_t_m_l_parser
Converting HTMLParser to snake_case should produce html_parser, not h_t_m_l_parser. Most case converters get this wrong. Here's why the right answer requires more than a regex.
camelCase vs snake_case: When to Use Each (And Why)
The choice between camelCase and snake_case feels arbitrary if you don't know the history. It isn't. The split reflects real differences in language design, terminal display, and the cultural preferences of the developer communities that built each language.
Read article →How to Capitalize Titles on Social Media (LinkedIn, X, Instagram)
Social platforms each have their own dominant capitalization style. Posts that match the platform's native rhythm tend to perform better — both because they look right and because they signal that the writer understands the medium.
Read article →Capitalizing Words After a Colon: The Definitive Guide
Colons introduce subtitles, lists, definitions, and clarifications. Whether you capitalize the word that follows depends partly on the style guide you follow and partly on whether what follows is a complete clause.
Read article →How to Capitalize Hyphenated Words in Title Case
Most title-case rules are mechanical: capitalize this, lowercase that. Hyphenated compounds are where the rules turn ambiguous and style guides start disagreeing — sometimes within themselves.
Read article →How to Capitalize Email Subject Lines
Email subject lines are the most-read sentences your brand ever writes. The capitalization choice affects open rates, perceived professionalism, and the very feeling readers have when your name appears in their inbox.
Read article →Words You Should Never Capitalize in a Title
There's a small set of English words that almost never get capitalized in titles. Knowing them by heart speeds up your headline writing — and helps you spot the few exceptions where the rules don't apply.
Read article →How to Capitalize Headlines Correctly (Every Rule, Explained)
Most people stop thinking about headline capitalization after they learn "capitalize the important words." But the important-word approach gets quietly wrong about a third of the time. Here's a complete walkthrough of how to do it consistently.
Read article →AP vs Chicago Style: Which Title Case Should You Use?
If you write headlines, articles, or book chapters in English, two style guides cover most of what you read: the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style. Picking between them is mostly about audience — but the rules really do diverge.
Read article →When to Use Title Case vs Sentence Case (With Examples)
Title case capitalizes most of the major words in a heading. Sentence case capitalizes only the first word and any proper nouns. Each one signals something different — and choosing wrong makes copy look amateurish in ways most people can't quite name.
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