Lower- or uppercase letters

When to use lowercase and uppercase letters in your academic writing?

1. Subject and research areas

Subject and research areas such as ’strategic management’, ’big data’ and ’business analytics’ are common nouns and do not usually take a capital letter:

  • The purpose of the course is to enable the students to participate in business analytics and business intelligence initiatives.
  • This article gives a broad overview of data science and the various fields within it, including business analytics, data analytics, business intelligence and machine learning.

Note: In English, there are two ways of using uppercase letters in titles and headings: 1) Capitalise the first letters of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and subordinating conjunctions, or 2) treat the heading as you would treat a sentence; you capitalise the first letter:

  • Managing Technology as a Business Strategy
  • Managing technology as a business strategy

2. Degrees, programmes and courses

When referring to degrees and study programmes in general, lowercase letters are used:

  • He grew up in Aarhus and later went to Herning to study for a bachelor’s degree at BTECH.
  • She received her master’s degree from BTECH last year.
  • BTECH offers a wide range of degree programmes within the fields of economics, business and engineering.

Course names are usually written with lowercase letters in Danish, whereas in English, the first letters of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and subordinating conjunctions are capitalised:

  • Afsætning og økonomi
  • People and Technology in Organisations

3. Job titles and academic degrees

In Danish, most job titles are written with a lowercase initial letter:

  • ”Man bør altid skrive stillingsbetegnelser med lille begyndelsesbogstav”, forklarede professor Balthazar.

In English, it is a little different. Here, titles are written with capital initial letters if the title is preceded by a name and with a lowercase initial letter if it follows the person’s name:

  • With the sun blaring down outside, Head of Department Anders Frederiksen congratulated all of the new graduates in front of a cheering crowd.
  • Since 2015, Anders Frederiksen has been head of department at BTECH.