When I taught at a Los Angles community college, I was the paid editor of our accreditation reports during my tenure. The first draft was cobbled together with the writings of fifty or so people, and my job was to create a consistency of voice and word choice. And grammar. After all, some people hold steadfast to the Oxford comma while others insist it is superfluous. I had to decide which was right for this publication.

One common inconsistency in the document was the use of capitalization. This is where I, with my Masters of Arts (capitalized as per AP Style) in English, got my real education on capitalization rules. One “rule” as I understood it was that only titles are capitalized, not positions or offices. And the accreditation report was about positions, certainly not the people who currently occupied those positions For example, “the senator” is not capitalized but “Senator Smith” is.

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