Grimmer Girl here. A few days ago I got a message from my good friend Richard asking about

capitalizing the word force from Star Wars, as in, may the force be with you. He had

been at a dinner party talking about the new movie, and then someone insisted that the

force should be capitalized. This is apparently what happens when literary people in Star Wars

fans meet for dinner. Richard wrote, quote, I'm arguing that the force isn't an officially recognized

faith, and thus should be lowercase, unquote. I agree that the force isn't a faith, but I thought

there might be other reasons to capitalize it. So I started browsing through the AP-style book

Religion section to see if I could find some kind of analog to the force. I thought about the

spirit since it wouldn't seem out of line to say me the spirit be with you. But the only entry

close to that was for the Holy Spirit, which the AP does say to capitalize, but only because it's

considered a deity, and all monotheistic deity names are capitalized. And I don't see the force as a

deity. So I'm considering that the force is more like a platonic ideal, like truth and beauty,

which are sometimes capitalized. For example, the Chicago Manual of Style says, quote, words for

transcendent ideas in the platonic sense are often capitalized, unquote. I ran this thinking by

Chuck Wendig, who recently wrote a New York Times best-selling Star Wars novel called Aftermath,

and he said my reasoning sounded fine to him. The force is capitalized in the book Aftermath,

and the Wookieedia Manual of Style also recommends capitalizing it. So there you go. If you're

writing about the force, capitalize it. And in other Star Wars formatting and spelling-related news,

my agent, Lori Abkameier, who is a big Star Wars fan and has seen the new movie at least three times,

pointed out that a review in Variety Magazine had spelled Chewbacca's nickname as Chewie,

like a cookie as Chewie, CHEWY, instead of Chewie, CHEWIE, which is the proper spelling, again,

according to Wookieedia. Oh, the horror, but to the author's credit, he changed the spelling after

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