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Our company produces educational materials for doctors. These document are printed matter, web pages and PDF files. And our information is organized and broken down by levels of headings.
I need to set a consistent policy of whether headings should be capitalized. What widely-used style guides have prescription either way?
The Oxford Manual of Style recommends that only the first letter of headings is capitalised, and applies this consistently. This should mean that all books published by the Oxford University Press are capitalised in this way.
Capitalize the first letter of headings and captions, though not of items in lists unless each element in the list forms a complete and separate sentence.
APA has rules for heading capitalization and formatting based on the level of the heading:
- Level 1: Centered, boldface, title case, followed by a line break
- Level 2: Left-aligned, boldface, title case, followed by a line break
- Level 3: Indented, boldface, sentence case, followed by a period
- Level 4: Indented, boldface, italicized, sentence case, followed by a period
- Level 5: Indented, italicized, sentence case, followed by a period
