Capitalization

In general, use AP style guidelines for capitalization. Exceptions are outlined in this section.

See Academic programs, degrees, courses and tests.
 

See ASU locations, campuses, buildings and units for guidelines. See ASU boilerplate text for campus descriptions.

Residential colleges

See ASU locations, campuses, buildings and units for guidelines.

Capitalize all words in the name of a designated or branded day, week, month or other time period:

• ✅ Do: Black History Month
• ✅ Do: International Women’s Day

Lowercase the time period in informal descriptions:

• ✅ Do: Memorial Day weekend
• ✅ Do: Christmas week

A complete list of university forms is at students.asu.edu/forms.

• Capitalize the full names of forms such as applications. Do not capitalize when used in a descriptive manner.
  • ✅ Do: ASU Scholarship Estimator, the scholarship estimator
  • ✅ Do: Enrollment Verification Request
  • ✅ Do: enrollment verification form, 🚫 Don't: Enrollment Verification Form

See Formatting for headline guidelines.
 

• New American University Scholars:
  • Uppercase “S” in Scholars
  • Most ASU merit-based awards are part of the New American University Scholarship and Financial Assistance program.
  • All recipients are called New American University Scholars with varying levels of awards.

See Times, days, months, seasons, years.
 

See Titles.
 

asu.edu subdomains and pages

• All pages on asu.edu follow ASU writing style guidelines. 
• In menus and navigation: For accessibility optimization, menus/navigation on asu.edu, use title case, with the first letter of each word capitalized.
  • ✅ Do: About Us, 🚫 Don't: About us
• In headings: Titles on page and in heroes follow AP style and are sentence case, with the first letter of the sentence and proper nouns capitalized. Also, capitalize the first word after a colon, to follow AP style for headlines. (In body copy, the first word after a colon is capitalized only if it starts a complete sentence.
  • ✅ Do: Engineering degree programs, 🚫 Don't: Engineering Degree Programs
  • ✅ Do: (header) The new thing: Nanotechnology 
  • ✅ Do: (body copy) He pointed out that there was one option: The company would continue to grow. 
  • ✅ Do: (body copy) He pointed out that there was one option: continued growth. 
  • 🚫 Don't: (body copy) He pointed out that there was one option: Continued growth.

URLs

URLs are always lowercase:

• ✅ Do: asu.edu
• ✅ Do: amazon.com
• ✅ Do: facebook.com

Website names

Names of websites are capitalized without quotes:

• ✅ Do: Facebook
• ✅ Do: LinkedIn
• ✅ Do: Amazon
• ✅ Do: Google