Do You Capitalize Family Titles?

When terms denoting family relationships are used as proper nouns (as names), they are capitalized. However, when the terms are used as common nouns (not as names), they’re not capitalized. Generally, there will be a possessive pronoun (my, her, his, our) or an article (the, a, an) in front of family titles used as common noun.

It’s easy to get confused about whether you should capitalize family names in your writing. If you come across a family “title” such as mom or dad in your writing, ask yourself: Is this title being used as if it were a person’s name? Is the person being directly addressed?

Can I go to the mall once I finish my homework, Mom?

I know the crash was serious, Dad, but I’d really like to borrow your car.

What have you been up to, Grandma?

In the examples above, Mom, Dad, and Grandma are capitalized because they are being used like names. You could replace them with proper names without changing the rest of the sentence.

What have you been up to, Diana?

If a family member is not being directly addressed, but rather is being spoken about, his or her family title should not be capitalized, and an article or possessive pronoun should be used before the title.

Gracie asked her mom if she could go to the mall after finishing her homework.

I asked my dad if I could borrow his car the day after the crash.

Lorraine wondered what her grandmother had been up to.

When quoting a conversation, simply think about whether that person is being directly addressed in the conversation.

“We will all remember Aunt Bessie for her generous nature,” Melinda said.

“I feel for Melinda’s loss,” said the neighbor. “Everyone remembers her aunt’s generous nature.”

6 Notable People Who Experienced Imposter Syndrome

An imposter is a fraud, someone who pretends to be something they aren’t. Often, their motive is to steal or take advantage of others. However, some people who feel like imposters aren’t guilty of any crime. They haven’t intentionally misled anyone.

According to psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, imposter syndrome affects many high-achieving individuals. You’ll be surprised at how many successful people don’t feel they deserve the praise they receive.

Dr. Margaret Chan

Forbes ranked Dr. Chan as 2013’s thirtieth most powerful woman in the world. It’s easy to see why—Queen Elizabeth II named her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and she finished two terms as the head of the World Health Organization. You would think that her educational background and decades of medical experience would make her feel like an expert in her field. However, in Susan Pinker’s book, The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap, she admits: “There are an awful lot of people out there who think I’m an expert. How do these people believe all this about me? I’m so much aware of all the things I don’t know.”

John Steinbeck

He won a Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. Decades after his death, his stories are still inspiring others. For example, the 2016 film In Dubious Battle, starring James Franco and Selena Gomez, was based on Steinbeck’s 1936 novel of the same name and tells the story of a pivotal labor strike in California. So, would you say that John Steinbeck is a great author? He wouldn’t have said the same of himself, according to his journal: “I am not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people.” In fact, he admired his characters for being “so much stronger and purer and braver” than he was.

Jodie Foster

It’s not uncommon for people to compare themselves with others who they feel are more talented. When 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace interviewed Jodie Foster after she won an Oscar for Best Actress, she said, “I thought it was a fluke. I thought everybody would find out, and they’d take it back. They’d come to my house, knocking on the door, ‘Excuse me, we meant to give that to someone else. That was going to Meryl Streep.’”

Meryl Streep

Of course, Meryl Streep would agree that she deserves an Academy Award, right? In one interview, she also describes her struggles with self-doubt: “I have varying degrees of confidence and self-loathing. . . . You can have a perfectly horrible day where you doubt your talent . . .” In a later article in The Guardian, she revealed that those feelings first took root in her childhood. “I didn’t have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.”

Cheryl Strayed

In the novel Torch, the main character, Teresa Rae Wood, encourages the listeners of her radio show to “be incredible.” In contrast, the creator of the character, Cheryl Strayed, finds it hard to acknowledge that she’s a remarkable author. In fact, she suggests that questioning your skills is a normal part of the writing process. “Writing is always full of self-doubt, but the first book [Torch] is really full of self-doubt, and it was much more of a struggle to keep the faith.” By the time her second book ranked first on the New York Times Bestseller list, “doubt and self-loathing” were so familiar to her that she thought, “Okay, this is how it feels to write a book.”

Emma Watson

How would you feel if magazines such as Elle and Vanity Fair featured beautiful pictures of you on their covers? Emma Watson, the actress who plays Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, feels like an imposter. To her, the lovely lady on the magazines seems like someone different from who she is in real life. Her struggles aren’t limited to the glossy pages of fan mags: “I’d walk down the red carpet and go into the bathroom,” she recalls. “I had on so much makeup and these big, fluffy, full-on dresses. I’d put my hands on the sink and look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Who is this?’ I didn’t connect with the person who was looking back at me, and that was a very unsettling feeling.”

Imposter isn’t the word you might associate with famous, talented, and successful people, but many of these notable people suffer from feelings of inadequacy. Though these emotions may stem from childhood, psychologists Clance and Imes recommend communication. Their study concludes “If one [person] is willing to share . . . , [others are] relieved to find they are not alone.” How do you feel about your success?

Capitalization: The Days Of The Week and The Months

Capitalization: The Days of the Week, the Months of the Year, and Holidays (But Not the Seasons Used Generally)

Days, months, and holidays are always capitalized as these are proper nouns. Seasons aren’t generally capitalized unless they’re personified.

The maid comes on Tuesdays and Fridays.

My doctor’s appointment is on Monday afternoon.

Your birthday is in March, right?

Thanksgiving in November, Christmas in December, and New Year’s in January: North America has a lot of winter holidays.

The seasons aren’t capitalized unless they’re being used as a proper noun, such as when personified in creative writing or poetry. Consider the sentences below:

My favorite season is autumn.

Many animals hibernate in the winter.

It’s that time of year again, when Winter blankets all creatures with somniferous snow and whispers to them, “Rest, children, rest.”

Generally speaking, the days of the week and months of the year are capitalized, but there are exceptions to this rule.

Monday Motivation Hack: Manage Your Morning

If you win the morning, you win the day.

Mornings set the tone for your day. If your habits are bad or simply uninspiring, they’ll steamroll your productivity and focus for the whole day. This week, we looked at what a range of successful people do in the morning. Groups included up-and-coming millennials, productivity hackers, and various kinds of leaders. Here’s a sampling of what they had in common.

1Start the Night Before

For many, the morning routine actually starts when they crawl into bed the night before. Prep for the following morning can include setting out clothes, double-checking the next day’s to-do list, or disconnecting from technology enough to ensure deep, healthful sleep during the night.

2Get Up Earlier

The majority of successful people are early risers. When you analyze the benefits, it’s easy to understand why—you’re less likely to get distracted and you have more willpower. Plus, it’s great motivation to sit down at your desk and feel like you’ve already accomplished a lot because, see, you’re pretty amazing.

No matter where I am in the world, I try to routinely wake up at around 5 am. By rising early, I’m able to do some exercise and spend time with my family, which puts me in a great mind frame before getting down to business. — Richard Branson

3Move

Whether it’s yoga, a light walk, stretching, or a full workout, almost everyone tries to do some form of movement to shake off the grogginess of sleep.

4 Hydrate and Fuel Up

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Not one “successful” morning routine we found skipped breakfast and hydration. Some were quite regimented (8 oz of water with lemon upon waking, without fail), while others were more casual. Regardless of what works for you, make sure you get water or tea and some food in the morning!

5 Meditate or Practice Focus

Tim Ferriss claims in his podcast that more than 80 percent of the people he interviews practice some kind of focus training or meditation. This practice can help set a calm tone for the day while also helping your brain focus throughout the day. His suggestions for success include finding the right format for you—even listening to a song with focus and intent can work wonders—then practice a minimum of 5 sessions before you decide to keep or toss the activity.

I made a deal with myself: If you don’t have 10 minutes for yourself, you don’t have a life. There’s no excuse. So I have 10 minutes, and I do this little ritual. —Tony Robbins

6 Set Your Goals for the Day

Almost everyone made time to revise their intention for the day. Many people did this mentally and only wrote down their priorities once they got to the office, but you can also set aside time to tweak schedules, to-do lists, and priorities on paper.

7 Practice Gratitude

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love. — Marcus Aurelius

Expressing gratitude in the morning helps to set a positive tone for your day and keeps any burdens during the day in perspective.

8 Work

A significant number of people make time to check and send emails, write, or work on personal projects. Even though they worked on different kinds of tasks, without fail everyone who did some kind of work did it as a very consistent part of their morning.

Tips for Starting a Morning Routine

Imagine and Plan Your Ideal Morning

It can be tempting to take Tony Robbins’ morning routine and try to replicate it step for step. While this may be a good starting point, you are a completely different person, living your own unique life. A fantastic routine is deeply rooted in knowing yourself and what makes you feel confident, accomplished, and motivated. Spend time imagining your perfect morning and mapping out three to five goals for every morning.

Don’t Make It All or Nothing

Once you understand what you want to accomplish every morning, give yourself some flexibility. Tim Ferriss recommends that you aim for at least a 60 percent completion rate of your morning goals. Life happens, and you may not always have your perfect breakfast or be able to squeeze in a forty minute run; be gentle with yourself.

Ease Into It

Though it will be exciting to start your new morning habits, it’s probably a bad idea to go whole hog. It can be painfully time consuming to adjust your sleeping schedule, let alone start exercising and making a full English breakfast every day. Prioritize your goals and introduce one at a time. As you get more and more comfortable with your new habits, keep tweaking, but take your time.

Do you have a morning routine? What is it like?

Looking for more productivity inspiration? Check out last week’s Monday Motivation Hack—taming your to-do list.

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Whether it’s a to-do list that never seems to get done, a less-than-inspired morning routine, or a tendency to get distracted (damn you, social media!), we’ve all got a hole in our productivity armor somewhere. Every Monday, we’re going to be analyzing common bad habits that could be holding you back and offer a hack or two to help you get more quality output from your time. Our Monday Motivation Hacks will help get you into fighting shape and give you some new tactics to try out on the battlefield.

A Style Guide Tutorial: Navigating the Citation and Formatting Jungle

You have to write a paper, or copyedit one, and you have a heap of style manuals in front of you. Which one do you use? Are they consistent? Is there a difference between them? Is it all arbitrary?

As you work on your text, it stares up at you, glaring with its colons, commas, and parenthetical citations. Where do they go? Are the lines single or double-spaced? How wide are the margins supposed to be? Wrestling the paper into twenty different shapes, you begin to hear voices: “the year, in parentheses, after the author’s name” and “no, no, the cited page number goes at the end of the sentence, in parentheses.”

Each style guide is specific, with literally thousands of differences between them. The waters get muddier. The overlap between the guides is enough to swirl in our heads like some alphabet soup. You think you find the right formatting guide and just when you become used to working with it, you discover another publishing house prefers something else.

It becomes clear that you should be at least marginally aware of several guides. Before you decide on one manual over the other, however, consider two questions:

• What are you writing?
• Who is your audience?

MLA Style:The MLA Style Manual is the ivory tower favorite. It had its genesis in the 1980s and quickly became the standard of university English majors everywhere. Not just limited to English papers, however, MLA is the style guide for a host of humanities disciplines, including foreign language studies. It is widely recognized as the preferred formatting style of scholars. You will find it used for any paper meant for publication in a humanities journal.

AP Style: The Associated Press Stylebook is the go-to manual for journalism. It has become the industry standard for broadcasters and newspapers, primarily due to its shortcuts. In this business, writing space is scarce, so little tweaks, like using numerals instead of written numbers, saves space, money, and time. Along with the Chicago Manual, AP is a formatting style often used by mainstream publishers.

Chicago Manual: If you write a paper on history, philosophy, or religion, it would be wise to become familiar with The Chicago Manual of Style. Also called Turabian, the Chicago Manual has flexible applications. Used by editors in multiple writing arenas, you are bound to bump into it. The differences between Chicago and AP can get rather cosmetic at times, but they are important differences. Editors are familiar with both guides and picking the right one can make or break your chances, if you are trying to publish.

APA Style: Created by the American Psychological Association, APA is the preferred citation style in disciplines such as business and medicine. APA’s system strives to help readers comprehend the material they are reading. Articles written for medical journals are formatted in APA style.

Bluebook: Created by the Harvard Law Review Association, the Bluebook is the bible of legal citation style. Most judges and lawyers were educated using the Bluebook. However, some courts have adopted their own systems. You should research a court’s specific formatting style before submitting any work to them.

Scientific Disciplines: When writing a scientific article, remember that nearly all of the disciplines have their own style guides, which are often specific tweaks on more mainstream guides. These tweaks matter, however. Whether it is the American Mathematical Society (AMS style), the American Institute of Physics (AIP style), or the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE style), there is a specific formatting guide out there exclusive to each.

If you are writing an academic paper, preparing a fiction manuscript for publication, or copyediting an existing manuscript, formatting is a key component to a polished product. Depending on your audience, or where you wish to publish the work, there are very specific guidelines concerning how a text should appear. A little research in the beginning will save you a lot of rewriting, and reformatting later.

What’s your preferred writing style? Share in the comments!

Writers on the State of Professional Writing

“We live in a content-saturated world,” your editor shrugs. Your coffee has suddenly gone cold, and so has the conversation.

What she means is that the commodity you’re offering – your writing – is hard to sell, because the web has made written words more readily available than ever. Honing a voice that stands out can feel like an impossible gig to take to the bank – which is where, if you’d listened to your parents, you’d be working, instead of haunting cafes and coffee shops with your laptop, trying to grind out a living as a writer.

The trouble is, for some of us, writing isn’t so much a choice as a necessity, akin to oxygen and Wi-Fi. And while writers who can afford spare homes along the French Riviera are the exception and not the rule, plenty of folks still succeed at making a career of it. Here’s what that looks like right now.

The Craft

Over the past decade, the mobile phone has supplanted familiar writerly standbys like word-processing software. Journalists use smartphones to quickly file breaking stories from the field. Novelists crank out tens of thousands of intimate words on tiny handheld keypads. The New Yorker published Jennifer Egan’s entire science-fiction story “Black Box” as a series of tweets, each one like a line from a poem.

Newfangled gizmos aside, there remains a place for old-fashioned pen and paper in the hearts (and desks) of certain writers – Neil Gaiman among them. The prolific Brit has written everything from comic books to novels to movies, and says writing in longhand helps him resist the allure of online distraction. You won’t find just one color among the pens in Gaiman’s bag, either:

Often I use two pens with different coloured ink, so I can tell visually how much I did each day. A good day is defined by anything more than 1,500 words of comfortable, easy writing that I figure I’m probably going to use most of in the end. Occasionally, you have those magical days when you look up and you’ve done 4,000 words, but they’re more than balanced out by those evil days where you manage 150 words you know you’ll be throwing away.

As Gaiman notes, writing remains hard work. Even titans of the field like John McPhee, the Pulitzer-winning pioneer of literary journalism, has confessed to The Paris Review that he can’t do it without first procrastinating mightily:

You’re out there completely on your own—all you’ve got to do is write. OK, it’s nine in the morning. All I’ve got to do is write. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four—this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning—I just try to write.

Makes you feel a little better about your own morning struggles, no?

Getting Paid

Writers are often caricatured as a species of starving artist, just scraping by for little or no pay and trying to build a reputation, as essayist Tim Kreider reflects in The New York Times:

A familiar figure in one’s 20s is the club owner or event promoter who explains to your band that they won’t be paying you in money, man, because you’re getting paid in the far more valuable currency of exposure. This same figure reappears over the years, like the devil, in different guises — with shorter hair, a better suit — as the editor of a Web site or magazine, dismissing the issue of payment as an irrelevant quibble and impressing upon you how many hits they get per day, how many eyeballs, what great exposure it’ll offer. ‘Artist Dies of Exposure’ goes the rueful joke.

Indeed, compensation can range from checks so piddly that the bank teller might sigh audibly while cashing it for you ($50 for a light, quippy post) all the way to a hefty buck-per-word rate for specialized longform reporting.

While some writers bank on having other gigs – the aforementioned McPhee has been a professor at Princeton for decades – not all are broke. Senior writers in the world of medicine, for instance, can easily make double the salary of a plucky word-slinger mashing out vanilla web content.

Self-Publishing

While the Internet age has made it easier than ever to skip the middleman and publish lengthy works directly online, this is a mixed bag.

On one hand, self-publishing authors who sell their e-books for a few dollars per download on sites like Amazon (which pockets 30 percent of the royalties) now routinely dominate sales, particularly in genres like romance, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries and thrillers. A few even make their way to bestseller lists, lighting a path to bankable publishing deals. Of this evolution, Publishers Weekly has remarked, “what is clear is that strong indie sales will continue and indie books are now a significant and permanent part of the book publishing landscape.”

However, there’s always a risk your work will be stolen. Thieves may tweak a few words here and there, or flip the genders of a few characters and make the lifted work harder for plagiarism-detection software to catch before putting it online under a new title. As a result, plagiarists can rake in thousands before anyone realizes what they’ve done. For the authors getting ripped off, this can lead to a lot of heartache. Straightening out such ordeals – and getting paid back for the pilfered sales – can take a lawyer.

Also, indie writers who thrive in the world of online publishing have to traffic not just in quality, but also in quantity, because the system rewards authors who can quickly follow up on their successes. For some, this means churning out a new full-length novel every month or so – a grueling pace of 10 to 20 pages daily.

So what about you? How are you channeling your zeal for writing? In what directions have you found the industry to be evolving? We’re always eager to read more from you.

9 Things You Need to Give up to Be a Successful Writer

Written communication isn’t easy. If it was, there would be no misunderstandings on social media, and we would never have to go back and clarify something we’d written after the fact. But that’s not the world we live in.

The need to improve one’s writing skills isn’t reserved only for those who want to be published novelists or award-winning journalists—there are endless benefits to being able to communicate through the written word.

If you want to become a better writer, here are nine things you absolutely need to give up today in order to succeed. We’ve divided them into parts designed to help you do two things—write with precision and write with artistry. Precise writing is technically correct and easy to understand. Artistic writing conveys a message or story in a way that resonates with the reader. Improving both precision and artistry will make you a better communicator no matter what your writing goals are.

Writing With Precision

1Give up your time.

Good writing takes time. The less time you invest in dashing off a quick message, the more likely that message is to be misinterpreted. Slow your roll, wordsmith! Does that text you composed accurately convey your thoughts? Good written communication requires attention to detail. You can’t pay attention to details if you’re rushing.

2Give up filler words.

We sometimes write like we talk. Conversational writing can be good, but writing that’s cluttered with filler words and phrases that we often use in conversation is not. Here are thirty-one to eliminate. And here are more tips for cleaning up your dirty, wordy writing.

3Give up your disdain for outlining

Unless you’re drafting something short and sweet, an outline can be a lifesaver. A builder wouldn’t dream of constructing something as complex as a house without a plan. Constructing any sort of long-form writing is easier with a plan, too. Even the simplest of outlines can save you a lot of time organizing and revising later.

Of course, some writers follow the “pantser” (as in flying by the seat of your pants) method, and that’s okay. Just be warned that if you don’t take time up front to organize your thoughts, you may have to commit to a more grueling revision process after you finish your draft.

4Give up the belief that you don’t need to proofread.

Even seasoned writers need to review their work before they publish that article, post that tweet, or send that email. It’s essential to not only look for spelling and grammar mistakes but also make sure your writing is clear.

Pro tip: Read your writing out loud. Does it read smoothly? If you find yourself stumbling as you read, revise for clarity. Shorter sentences are easier to read and understand than long complex ones. Keep it simple . . . unless you’re striving to be the next Tolstoy.

Writing With Artistry

5Give up the impossible dream of a perfect first draft.

It’s important to write clearly and correctly. That’s a worthwhile goal. But you’ve got to get the words out first. Turn off the oppressive voice of perfectionism while you work on your first draft and focus on flow, instead. Try to write without stopping to make corrections—you’ll do that later. Instead, let the thoughts in your head spill onto the page. You’ll only get at those interesting and artistic thoughts if you stop interrupting them long enough to let them speak.

Perfect first drafts are like mythical unicorns—they exist only in our imaginations. Write first, edit later.

6Give up the belief that good writing depends on talent.

Thomas Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Innate talent won’t save a lazy writer, but hard work will help even a struggling writer succeed. If you don’t have a gift for writing, but you’re willing to put in the time to develop your skills, you can’t help but improve.

7Give up the need to talk about writing more than actually writing.

Aspiring creative writers and bloggers are often guilty of this writing sin. We love to talk about the writing we’re going to do and share the ideas we have, but when it comes to actually putting our butts in our chairs and our fingers to our keyboards . . . not so much. If you talk about writing more than you actually write, it’ll be difficult to succeed. See tip number one!

8Give up needless distractions.

Hey! You there! Step away from the smartphone.

If you’re going to write, just write. Silence your phone. Close those unnecessary tabs. Maybe go into full-screen mode to keep your writing space clutter free. You’ll be surprised how clearing mental space for writing allows the words to flow.

Here’s a tip: Try a distraction-free writing platform such as Ommwriter or FocusWriter if you need a little extra help blocking out distractions.

9Give up your excuses.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “Writers write.” What does it really mean?

It means that if you want to call yourself a writer, you need to actually be one. If you find yourself making excuses instead of writing, it’s time to take a look at your priorities. Writers prioritize writing time—it’s as simple as that.