Category Archives: paralegal

Deciding whether or not to capitalize a word is sometimes confusing.  We know to capitalize proper nouns, which are the official name of a particular person, place, or thing.  Trade names, trademarks, and business names should all be capitalized as the owner of the name prefers (subject to some grammar rules – see below).  If you don’t know what they prefer, confirm it by searching for the home page on the Internet and seeing how they treat capitalization.  For example, I see this spelled wrong more frequently than it is spelled correctly:

As you can see from the office.microsoft.com website, Microsoft capitalizes both “P’s” in PowerPoint.  Thus, being lazy and only capitalizing the first one is just plain wrong!

Also remember not to expect that your reader knows what the product is that you are describing.  For instance, “The Phoenix pawn shop had 10 stolen Rolexes” is more appropriately stated “The Phoenix pawn shop had 10 stolen Rolex watches” since your reader may not know that Rolex is a watch.  If, however, the product name describes the product, it is not necessary to further describe it, as in “My daughter’s favorite Easter candy is a Cadbury Cream Egg.”

Where the trademark officially begins with a lowercase letter, it still falls under the “normal” English capitalization rules because, as the “official” name of a thing, it should be written with an initial capital letter.  For example, the official lowercase “craigslist” would be “I found my treadmill on Craigslist.”

However, where the name begins with a pronounced lowercase separate letter followed by a capitalized letter, it should be the official name unless it starts a sentence or otherwise should be capitalized based on the normal grammar rules.  For example “EBay had the best deal on Mary’s iPod.” is correct because it starts a sentence, even though it is not the correct trademark.  It would be better reworded to “Mary got the best deal on her iPod on eBay.”

Take the time to research proper capitalization.  Companies register trade names and trademarks for a reason and it is important to be correct when using them.  It shows that you are interested in quality work product.

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Quotation marks and apostrophes are important, but when proofreading, make sure the STYLE of the apostrophe and quotation marks are the same throughout the document.  Either curly or straight marks are fine depending on personal preference and, of course, consistency.  Choose a style and stick with it.  There is a way to set your preferred style of mark in Word so that as you type, that style is used.  However, when you (or the author) cuts and pastes something from another document, it may not adopt the style of your document.  It is a very small thing that can make a huge difference.  Global search and replace for quotation marks and then for apostrophes will fix the consistency issue easily.

Speaking of quotations, one thing you should always try to do is to check the language of the quotation to make sure that what is quoted is exact.  Attorneys who draft their own documents and type information from another document sometimes miss a word, miss a line, or otherwise unintentionally “adjust” a quotation.  When something is quoted, you are saying to your reader that you have taken the exact language from somewhere else and are inserting that exact language into your document.  It is extremely important that language that is quoted is right.  If your reader (and heaven forbid it is a judge) figures out it is not an exact quote, you will lose credibility.  Even worse, if an important quote is not exact, the other side will have a heyday with that and your attorney could lose the entire argument over it.  Find the original document and confirm the quotation.  If you can’t access the original document on your own computer system, don’t be shy about asking the author for the document.  It is THAT important.

If a short quotation is included, it can be set off by quotation marks within the paragraph.  If, however, the quotation is more than about four lines of text, it should be offset in a separate paragraph that is indented on both sides.  If the quotation is indented, do not use quotation marks.  The reader should understand that the indented language is quoted so quotation marks are unnecessary.

Quotations are a big part of legal matters and it is really important that they are correct.  You can quote me on that!

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A quick tip for this week.  A fairly common error easily caught by good proofreading is where the same word appears both before and after a nonessential phrase.  For example, “We must be sure that, without fail, that we get the timesheets posted by the end of the month.”  One thing that I try to do while proofreading is to take out the nonessential phrase to make sure the sentence still makes sense.  In the above example “We must be sure that that we get the timesheets posted by the end of the month.”  When you check the sentence that way, you will see the second “that.” Reading the sentence without the nonessential phrase will also help to make sure that the phrase being treated as nonessential by being set off by commas actually IS nonessential because the sentence will still make sense without that phrase.  When sentences get long (as lawyers sometimes tend to make them), it is even more important to check for the same word on both sides of a nonessential phrase.  This simple check will help the sentence make sense and help prove that your proofreading skills make everyone look good.

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