4. Capital Letters in Names

Capital letters are used at the start of sentences and to denote proper nouns, like Jason Deign. No problem with that. It is a convention which has helped generations of readers make sense of the texts they are reading. That was until the last decade or so, at least. Since then, a growing number of companies appear to have decided they could defy the laws of grammar and use a lower-case initial in their name, even when it started a sentence. This trend (whose followers I shall not name, but which include several large organisations you are very likely to have heard of) appears to been born out of re-branding exercises where businesses have invested a substantial amount of money in a name and logo and where the branding agency decides a lower case initial is an essential part of the new brand identity. Leaving aside the issue of whether a branding agency should dictate how the rest of the world uses the English language, I believe this practice is a pointless affectation on a number of levels:

• It impairs readability and understanding.
• It is almost impossible to maintain consistently in practice as most people (and word processing systems) will revert to using initial caps anyway.
• It assumes the company name and logo are the same, which is not the case. They are two separate elements of an organisation’s brand identity.

Similarly annoying are companies that use odd combinations of lower and upper case letters in their names (easyJet, for example; why not Easyjet?). If you are working as a journalist, you will often find your publication’s editorial guidelines are pretty strict on how these names should be written (and it is usually using the standard convention of an initial capital letter followed by lower case). If you are working for a company that has one of these names, you will probably have to stick to its corporate guidelines, but do not be afraid to ask.

Finally, if you are ever in a position to advise a business on how its name should be written, tell your client that anything other than the standard convention is only going to cause headaches. Even companies like BT and BAA, whose all-upper-case names are based on pre-privatisation acronyms, find they are still regularly referred to in the press by their former labels (British Telecom and British Airports Authority, respectively).