THIS IS UPPER CASE.
this is lower case.
This is sentence case.
This Is Title Case.
Title case is for titles, not for bullets. When I see title case in bullets and sub-bullets, I cringe. This may seem like a minor point, but it’s not. Title case used incorrectly makes your slides hard to read, confusing, and makes you look like an amateur. Luckily, it’s a very easy mistake to fix so we can all move on to the bigger issues of presenting your business story.
Title Case Is Hard to Read for Anything More Than a Short Title Because When People Read Their Eyes Scan the Shapes of Words and Too Much Capitalization is Hard to Scan.
Title case can also cause confusion because proper nouns, as we all learned in grammar school, are capitalized to make them stand out from common nouns. Proper nouns get lost in the upper-case tangle, forcing the audience to work harder to puzzle out your meaning and distracting them from your narrative flow.
Here’s an example slide from an actual presentation, untouched. The author applies title case at random, compounding the confusion.
Use title case only in real titles—of a slide, of a chart, etc. Not in any bullets.
First-order bullets usually have an initial cap.
Secong-order bullets (sub-bullets) can have either an initial cap, or no cap. I prefer no cap because it helps make them stand out even more from the main bullets.
Here’s a slide from an actual presentation, followed by my changes to the same slide. Compare:
Wrong use of title case:
Correct use of sentence and lower case:
So from now on you’ll be sensitive to title case, and will be careful to use it only in titles. And please do me a favor–whenever you see it in other people’s slides, gently point out the error. Together we’ll reverse this puzzling, ubiquitous worst practice and start eradicating one more cause of ugly slides and confusing presentations.
Fun fact: “Camel case” is the term for capitalization of an interior letter of a word. Although not a new phenomenon (MacCloud, DuPont, NaCl, CinemaScope), it’s recently become widespread in commercial names arising from the need to spell out domain names. Examples: WordPress, MySpace, iPod, TiVo, BizClarity.