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Subject:Re: Heading and Title Capitalization From:"Atkinson, Phil" <Phil -dot- Atkinson -at- BRAID -dot- CO -dot- UK> Date:Tue, 2 Mar 1999 10:07:52 -0000
Porrello, Leonard wrote: Since the rule (Chicago and MLA) regarding
titles is to capitalize the first letter of every content word, to deviate
might unwarrantedly attract a literate user's attention.
You refer to Chicago (Chicago Manual of Style I assume) and MLA (?) as
providing rules. Neither of these publications, or any other style guide,
provides rules - they can only provide conventions and guidelines. The very
nature of style today is that there are very few (if any rules) that
ultimately cannot be broken or redefined.
The first rule I follow when writing user documentation is that the user
comes first - if it works for them, it works for me. If I can produce a
funky new document that satisfies the user, I have succeeded - even if it
doesn't follow accepted conventions.
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Phil Atkinson - Documentation Manager - Braid Systems Limited mailto:phil -dot- atkinson -at- braid -dot- co -dot- uk
Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting
