Project Title Capitalization Rules

Titles of projects submitted to the California State Science Fair may have their capitalization changed to be consistent throughout the Fair. Generally speaking, most words in titles will be capitalized following the guidance of the Chicago Manual of Style. Our capitalization convention is as follows:
  1. Capitalize
  2. Unless covered above, do not capitalize

Standard capitalization rules in specific scientific fields will overrule the above conventions. Examples include the rules for genus and species in taxonomic nomenclature (e.g., Homo sapiens, with the species uncapitalized), specific terms (e.g. “pH”), and generally accepted acronyms, such as DNA.

Subtitles are set off by colons, not dashes or parentheses. For example, “My Long-Term Project: Phase III.”

Punctuation in submitted titles may be altered, again for consistency throughout the Fair. Quotation marks will usually be removed, entirely capitalized words (other than acronyms) will be normalized as described above, and multiple exclamation and/or question marks will be removed.

Finally, obvious grammatical and spelling errors in titles (e.g., “affect” confused with “effect”) will be corrected. In cases where title language is unclear, the author(s) will be contacted directly for clarification.

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Last updated: Wed Apr 18 10:58:01 2007
California Science & Engineering Fair / Project Title Capitalization Rules / CSEF@usc.edu