Title case headings from chatbots
Models capitalize every important word in a heading because their training set is full of marketing pages and slide decks. Pattern 17 in REhume is: use sentence case. I follow it on this site, in READMEs, and in anything that will be grepped later.
What I change
Before: Strategic Negotiations And Global Partnerships
After: Strategic negotiations and global partnerships
Proper names stay capitalized. “AWS” stays “AWS.” “iPhone” stays “iPhone.” Sentence case is not “lowercase everything.” It is “capitalize the first word and the names.”
The tell is the little words getting dressed up: And, Of, To, With. Humans writing fast often leave those small. Models are consistent in the wrong direction.
Why it matters
Title case makes every heading look like a campaign. A ten-heading article becomes a brochure. Sentence case recedes so the body can do the work.
It also matches Wikipedia and most engineering blogs. If I am going to steal a convention, I steal the one used by people who maintain long documents, not the one used by people who ship a landing page once.
Exceptions
Legal captions, newspaper titles you are quoting, and product names that are officially title case. I do not “correct” a quoted headline. I do correct the heading I wrote for my own section.
I also leave title case in UI strings that are title case in the product. The heading “Save As” is the menu name, not my prose.
How I edit
I read headings only, first pass. Downcase by hand or let REhume do it. Then I restore names. This is cheap and deterministic. I do not send a heading to the model to ask how to capitalize it.
If a heading is also a full sentence, sentence case was already the right idea. “What happens when the budget parks” is a heading I would actually write.
Neighbors
Title case arrives with emoji and fragmented headers: a grand heading, then a one-line paragraph that repeats it. Flatten the echo. Keep one of the two.
It also pairs with the rule of three in outlines: three sibling headings, each title case, each promising a theme. I break the set if the material is two topics, not three.
Practice
List every heading in a generated draft. If more than half contain “And” or “Of” in capitals, it was produced as a slide outline. Rewrite the outline as questions or as verbs: “Park the rewrite API,” not “Comprehensive Overview Of System Limitations.”
The pattern encyclopedia is the one-line rule. This page is the editing pass I run before I care about word choice.