Capitalization question (Greek related!)

[Jen]

.

[christiangirl]

For organizations in general, the lowercase is correct but does not HAVE to be lowercase. Apparently, it's called the "ego rule"--if the position is particular important (or if the higher ranking person just feels it looks better) you can capitalize. It's not technically correct, but you can.

http://data.grammarbook.com/blog/cap...th-job-titles/

[TPA85]

Personally, I would capitalize the positions. I agree that it just doesn't look right lowercase.

[TonyB06]

Originally Posted by Jen

I know that the rule for capitalization in titles is that if it precedes someone's name you capitalize (Senator Jones), but if it's describing it's lowercase (The senator arrived at noon). Somehow, this doesn't look right to me regarding Greek officer titles.

For example, I would write the following:

"The Vice President of Programming was ..."
or
"You can talk to our Social Chair about that."

I don't think it looks right as:

"The vice president of programming was..."
or
"You can talk to our social chair about that."

I feel like the capitals just ... look good lol. Oddly, I feel like the VP sentence needs capitalization but I could go either way with the social chair one.

I'm pretty sure lowercase is technically correct ... but does it HAVE to be? How would you write them?

Whether you're "correct" or not depends on what style you're using. What you described above, capitalizing before the name but not after is Associated Press (and possibly others), used by lots of media outlets. Other "styles" you might consider using may have different rules.

[LXA SE285]

Book editor here—Chicago concurs with AP.

[MysticCat]

Fowler's Modern English Usage, Sir Ernest Gowers, ed. (2nd Ed. Oxford 1965) follows the rule that I learned long ago: Capitalize if one is referring to a specific office or holder of an office, even when the name is not used (thus, the person who works in the Oval Office is always the President, not the president), and do not capitalize if one is referring to an office generally. (Thus, "The funeral was attended by presidents and kings.")

In Fowler's we find: "The use of Capitals is largely governed by personal taste, and my own, while not favouring seventeenth-century excess, happens to favour even less the niggardliness now sometimes apparent. The printed page that is starved of capitals suffers not merely in appearance (to my eye at any rate) but also in function, for denial of capitals to well-known bodies, institutions, officials and the like militates against ready reference."