Elliot Cohen
Editor
One of the greatest joys of a community newspaper is when the community contributes to what is printed. The CVE Reporter wouldn’t be the crucial source of village information that it is without the constant contributions of residents.
We will always welcome the submissions of our residents, and each month endeavor to print as many as possible. While putting together the paper is a labor of love, recently it has required a bit more labor due to constant and common grammar mistakes in almost everything submitted.
The most common error involves the erroneous use of capitalization. Many submissions contain countless words that are improperly capitalized.
There are only three basic types of words that should be capitalized in a sentence: a pronoun, the first word in a sentence, and a proper noun. If a word is not one of these three, it usually should not be capitalized.
If, for example, you are referring to the village, village should not be capitalized unless it is part of the proper name Century Village East. Similarly, you would write about “Doctor Smith,” capitalizing the ‘d’ in doctor because it is part of a proper name. But but you would also write about the doctor (lowercase ‘d’) in the office.
If you are referring to a board of directors, you generally will not capitalize it. According to the AP Stylebook, the general rule is to lowercase the word “board” unless it is used as part of a proper name or as the first word in a sentence.
Here is a good rule of thumb: When in doubt, if the word is not beginning a sentence and is not part of a proper title or name, keep it lowercase.