Addergoole Style Guide

[aldersprig]

rix_scaedu raised a question in alpha-reading the upcoming Addergoole-Year-9, and I never did answer it well in the original series - "should it be crew, or Crew?"

I'm going to stretch that out to - what things should I capitalize?

* Each word in a Working?
* the word Working?
* Bond? This one I hesitate on, because it looks to me too much like the Blood Bond in White Wolf.

Things that I know are always cap:
* Keeping, Kept (not sure on Owning, Owned), Belonging.
* Law
* references to a position as per the Law - Mentor, Student, Mother, Child (but only in that context)

I seem to have settled on capitalizing Daeva, Mara, Grigori.

Urg!

Comments

[inventrix]

MY TUPPENCE

If you look at the things are always capitalized, you can see that the clear trend is to capitalize words that indicate something dictated by Ellehemaei Law. THUS:

crew, not Crew, since the members of a crew are not bound into the relationship by Law

Working, not working, because it is a specific magical variant on an ordinary English word

bond, not Bond, because one can simply say "bond of Belonging" or some such thing, thus transferring the capitalization necessary to separate it out as being bound by Law to the relationship itself.

I think that if Keeper/Keeping/Kept is capitalized, owner/owning/owned should not be, as it does not make that much sense to have multiple Official words for the members of such a relationship.

Of course you would capitalize Daeva, Mara and Grigori; they are proper nouns!

[inventrix]

Further comments because I forgot about Workings themselves:

I definitely do not think you should capitalize the words that are not Words (notice I capitalized Words, it is for the same reason as Working), i.e. the Greek/etc. syntactical parts.

I am, however, unsure about the Words themselves. On the one hand, they would seem by their inherently magical nature to fit in the capitalization category. However, they are not ordinary English words, so their different-ness might already mark them out?

On the third hand, they are special Words of Power (that capitalization was just me doing my emphasis thing), so I feel like they probably should be capitalized.

On the fourth hand, you never have capitalized them?

[aldersprig]

I do sometimes capitalize them; generally, if I'm writing by myself, I do. When I was writing with E., I didn't.

[inventrix]

Ah-HA.

So that's two for one in favor of capitalizing them. The answer is now clear. 8)

[aldersprig]

I like your answers and, more importantly, the logic behind them.

[inventrix]

Eeexcellent. *steeples fingers* I am nothing if not logical.

[aldersprig]

I appreciate you lending me your logic.

[clare_dragonfly]

I admire and agree with your logic :D