Grammar girl here, this week I have a quick and dirty tip about capitalizing time periods.

The run down on less versus fewer, it's probably not as simple as you think, and a tidbit

about where we get the phrase the bees knees.

Eras and time periods with specific names are capitalized.

For example, the Bronze Age, the Middle Ages, the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties and the

Renaissance.

Those are all capitalized because they're the specific names of time periods, historical

periods, or ages.

You don't capitalize the word the, so in the Jazz Age, the is lower case, but you capitalize

the rest of each of those names.

On the other hand, if the name is simply descriptive, keep it lower case.

Examples from the AP style book and the Chicago Manual of Style that stay lower case except

for the name of the country include Ancient Greece, Ancient is lower case, Greece is

capitalized.

Classical Rome, Classical is lower case.

The Colonial period, the whole thing is lower case, and the Antibellum period, that whole

thing is lower case too.

When you're writing about centuries, the words also remain lower case, but there's a difference

between AP and Chicago style.

In AP style, you use the number 17th, and in Chicago style, you write out the word 17th.

But either way, you keep the word century lower case.

And that was your quick and dirty tip.

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