Grammar Girl here, I'm in Yonfoguri.

In this week, I have a quick and dirty tip about when you should capitalize job titles,

a meeting middle about the difference between the abbreviations i.e. and e.g. and a tidbit

about sentence diagramming.

And now onto our quick and dirty tip.

Planning job titles can be tricky because they aren't always capitalized, but it seems

like a lot of people want to see their titles capitalized whether they should be or not.

I'm talking about titles such as Vice President, Sales Director, Chairperson, Mayor, and

Emperor.

In general, titles that come before names are capitalized, and titles that come after names

are lowercase.

The thing you have to figure out is whether the word is part of a name unit in an official

title in which case it's capitalized, or if it's just describing someone's role in

which case it's lowercase.

For example, let's imagine that Ardvark is class president.

He's very responsible.

If you write, we invited President Ardvark to dinner.

You capitalize President because it's his official title and it's right before his name.

But if you write Ardvark, the class president came to dinner, President is lowercase because

it's after his name and it's just descriptive.

You're describing his role instead of using President as his official title.

And if there's no name, the title is usually lowercase.

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