majuscule ~ The Word Blog

Proofreaders’ Marks

Unless you’re e. e. cummings or k.d. lang, you’re probably fond of using capital letters from time to time.* But what if you happen to miss one of them now and again? Well, you can easily turn a lowercase letter to a capital with a triple underline.

Now, on occasion you may also want a small capital. Say you’re making a list of authors and Marshall McLuhan is among them. Oh, and did I mention that your list was in all caps? In that case you can use a double underline to indicate that the c in his name ought to be in small caps like the ac in MacDonald. (Edit: the small caps I’m referring to here are shown in the list below and not the sentence that precedes this edit.)

And, truly, that’s all there is to turning your lowercase letters into majuscules!

Want to know how to make capital letters into lowercase ones? You can find that entry here.

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*Caveat: For all I know, cummings and lang may delight in capital letters. I didn’t call them up to ask them—cummings’ number wasn’t listed for some reason anyway—and just made up this bit of libel to be witty. (I hope it worked.)

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That red pencil still burning a hole in your pocket protector? You can find a full listing of all the Word Blog’s Proofreaders’ Marks entries here.

2 comments

Proofreaders’ Marks

Maybe caps lock was on. Or maybe the author just got a little carried away, capitalizing anything that seemed remotely important. Either way those capitals need to be lowercased. So how do you mark that on your document? It’s easy: you just use a slash:And you don’t have to worry about your lowercase markup being confused with a deletion mark because you’re remembering to add that little flourish to your deletion marks like I showed you in the last proofreaders’ marks entry, right?

So you can slash through those unnecessary capitals with confidence, knowing they’ll be brought down to size. Nevertheless, it’s a good idea to put a circled^* lc in the margin next to the line so no one misses your markup:

_*Unless it’s an official proofreaders’ mark, you need to enclose any markup you don’t want added to the text within a circle. If your lc appears uncircled, it’s possible that an inputter (who isn’t reading for content but just inserting changes) will add the letters l and c into the document—oops.

Edit: A friend recently asked me what she should do if she wanted to make an entire word or a series of letters lowercase. Should she draw a slash through each letter?

In order to save you time, I realized that I should address that issue here. If you have a series of letters, a whole word, or a sentence that you’d like to lowercase, you can simply draw a slash through the first letter and then draw a line horizontally from the slash above the rest of the letters you’d like to make lowercase: