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Comment by kozziollek | Hacker News Reader

Offtopic: could people that write news titles please learn how to capitalize words? Or can we make sure that at AI will know it, when most of news are written by it?

Took me 3 tries to parse the title.

"Rivian Joins Forces" - is that name of an organization? - "with Tesla"... nope, that doesn't make sense.

"Rivan Joins forces" (somebody to do something), syntax error got "with".

"Rivan joins forces with Tesla" - yay!

And you know that person who wrote this knows about lowercase, because of "with" and "for"...

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The article is titled correctly per most style guides:

Generally speaking, AP style uses title case for headlines, which means all words are capitalized except for certain short words, such as articles and short prepositions.

In AP style, headlines capitalize the first word, proper names, or proper abbreviations, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs.

Words that should not be capitalized include:

    Articles (a, an, the)
    Short (fewer than 5 letters)
    Coordinating Conjunctions (and, but, for)
    Prepositions (at, by, from, etc.)

https://writer.com/blog/a-comprehensive-guide-to-the-ap-styl...

What you say about AP style is not quite correct. Actually, AP uses sentence case for headlines. Title case is only used for composition titles, i.e., the titles of books, movies, plays, etc.

Don't be so smug. This title follows the AP style guide for headlines, which is the norm. So it's not so much that "people that write news titles" need to learn to capitalize words, it's that you need to learn how to read them.

Here we go again: HN user educates experts from different domain about said domain.

Why not say "I prefer X" instead of "you are too stupid to do X"?

Which might be a legit point and could lead to an interesting conversation...

It is called Title Case and part of a lot of (American?) news organizations style guides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case

It confuses me, a non-native English speaker, a lot too. I hate it.

It's often confusing to native speakers as well, especially in a domain like this where words like "join" and "force" can easily be used as buzzwords.

Title case makes a certain limited sense in newspapers. But on HN, where most articles don't use the title case even when the underlying media do use it, there is a lot of potential for confusion.

Me too. They should just use the German way.

Nomens are big and other Words are small.

I've never understood the point of this. This capitalization standard carries no information. How many nouns in German can also be other parts of speech? It is easy to learn, but how useful is it?

Many nouns have forms shared by corresponding adjectives and verbs. Some words are overloaded in other ways (e.g. pronouns and nouns). It actually happens quite often and I'd say it helps clear up confusion.

It’s called Title Case, major words are capitalized and minor words aren’t.

https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/capitaliza...

Title case is distinct from sentence case...

"For Whom the Bell Tolls"

"For whom the bell tolls"

The former is correct for titles. The latter is correct for ordinary sentences.

In titles, almost all words are capitalized (except for small word like articles of speech).

I think "with" should be capitalized but "for" should not. I believe AP style guide says that propositions that are four or more letters should be capitalized.

> ... propositions that are four or more letters ...

So "yes" and "no" but "Maybe"? :-)

> Took me 3 tries to parse the title.

Sounds like, to take a phrase from the youths, a skill issue.

But you and others here may be interested in Language Log's posts on headline dialect:https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=277

A personal target I have is that I compare my intelligence to an LLM by seeing if it correctly interprets things people say that I have trouble with. In this way, I can see where the LLMs are beating me. I had no trouble with this headline but had I had trouble, I would conclude that ChatGPT-3.5 is smarter than I am on headline interpretation, because it interprets the headline concordant with the story first time.

In this model, I would judge myself as less able to extract information from other humans than ChatGPT. I believe that the ability to extract signal is a good marker of intelligence. Low-spec intelligences often require high-precision: they are more like formal language parsers than natural language parsers and are therefore less sophisticated.

This style of capitalisation is called Title Case [1] and is quite common in English print media.

There are quite a few automated tools to convert back and forth, maybe a future site improvement for Dang in the user preferences.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case

As a non-native English speaker I was confused by the need to capitalize so many words (but not all) in headers. I make frequent use of https://capitalizemytitle.com/ to make sure that I follow some type of standard.

Title case is standard in news headlines.

This is entirely a personal problem. The title is correctly written.

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