Capitalisation

There are two common forms of capitalisation — "Sentence case" and "Title Case".

EDS uses sentence case as the primary capitalisation style. That means only the first letter of the first word in the sentence or the phrase is capitalised, except for proper nouns. Use sentence case for almost all copywriting.

Writing in sentence case has been proven to be easier for users to read and comprehend. It sounds more friendly and less formal. Our goal in product copywriting is to help users complete their actions. Minimising the use of capitalised words and phrases helps achieve that goal.

It also helps users to distinguish between common nouns and proper nouns. If you have two proper nouns (e.g. product names) in a sentence, it's easier to read when the rest is in sentence case. For example, "Automatic reporting is the latest feature in Payroll, ELMO’s flagship product". With the proper nouns being capitalised, the emphasis is on the product and company names.

For example, use sentence case in:

• Instructional text
• Headings
• Buttons
• Links
• Labels
• Tooltips

In title case, each word in the phrase is capitalised, except for articles (a, an, the) and most prepositions (in, on, for, etc). EDS uses title case for all proper nouns, or when referring to a certain page, section, step or feature that has a distinctive name, or that needs emphasis and comes after a preposition.

For example, use title case in:

• Product and service names
• Person names
• Course names

Avoid using uppercase text (sometimes called "all caps") in product copywriting. It affects readability, comprehension, and usability, and can be distracting to the user. It also changes the tone of voice, and users process text in all caps slower.

However – there are some exceptions:

• Our company name "ELMO" should always be written in uppercase because it's an abbreviation.
• Other commonly used abbreviations and acronyms.
• When you need to shout out an important word to bring attention to the following content.
• When referring to file types, use uppercase and no preceding period.

When referring to file extensions, precede with a period, then lowercase the extension name's acronym.

Some company or product names can be written in upper and lowercase.