How Should Trademarks be Written?

Some names, including many names starting with Mc- or O'-, should have more than one capital letter in them (such as McDonald or O'Donnell). It would be wrong to write Mcdonald, or O'donnell. Essentially, I think that the person whose name it is gets to decide how it should be spelled or capitalized.

I assume that this principle would carry over to other proper nouns, including names of companies or products.

There are a number of innovations in capitalization and punctuation invented by trademark owners for use in proper nouns, including:

1. Eliminating the space between words, resulting in internal capital letters that correspond to word boundaries (“WordPress”, “ValuJet”)
2. When the first word is a single letter, lowercasing it but capitalizing the second letter, corresponding to the first letter in the second word (“iPod, eBay”)
3. Using capital and lowercase letters in arbitrary combinations (“deviantART”, “Mitsubishi i MiEV”)
4. Not capitalizing initial letters (“first direct”, “craigslist”)
5. Using all capital letters for non-acronyms (“LEGO”, “BEER-NUTS”)
6. Using nonstandard punctuation marks (“Macy*s”, “M•A•C”)
7. Using sentence termination punctuation marks in a name (“Yahoo!”, “Guess?”)

And even crazier things, like specifying that a name must always appear in a certain typeface, type weight, or color. The point of all these unusual treatments is to make the trademarks stand out; that is, to draw attention to the unusualness of the trademark in order to make it more memorable.

However, from the standpoint of the conventions of standard written English, all of these things violate the conventions, and there is no reason why you, as a writer, cannot simply adhere to the conventions. Trademarks are words and there are rules about how to use capital letters, lowercase letters, and punctuation when writing words:

• The first word of a sentence always has an initial capital letter, whether or not it would be capitalized elsewhere in the sentence.
• Proper nouns, which trademarks are a subcategory of, have a capital initial letter in each word which is part of the proper noun.
• The only punctuation marks that can appear as part of a word is the apostrophe (’) and the hyphen (–). All other punctuation is for connecting words, phrases, and sentences together.

From the perspective of correctness in writing, there is nothing wrong with adhering to these conventions strictly and reformatting all trademarks to make them compliant: Word Press (or Wordpress), Deviant Art, I Pod (or I-Pod), Macy’s, Yahoo, Lego, etc. If you are someone who is deciding on formatting standards for writing, this a perfectly reasonable and unimpeachably correct paradigm to establish. However, if you look at how professionally-edited publications are handling these kinds of cases nowadays, you will find yourself in a distinct minority if you take as hard-line an approach as that.

Instead, most publications have compromised, and are allowing some innovative treatments that are not too distracting: the first two kinds of innovations, internal capitals at (former) word boundaries (as in “ValuJet”), and a single lowercase initial followed by a capital letter (as in “iPod”). The justification is that these are close enough to the normal rules, with a capital letter at (or near) the beginning, and not too many other capital letters, that they can be tolerated, although most probably insist that things like “iPod” can never appear at the beginning of a sentence, or if they must, then they are capitalized: “IPod”.

As for the other innovations, they have generally been ruled too unusual to be kept in respectable published prose. It would seem like too much bending over backwards to please the trademark owner and not enough caring about not being confusing or misleading to their readers. In my opinion, writing should be composed for the benefit of the reader, not for the benefit of the capitalization whims of the person who invented the thing you’re writing about.

As a side note, were I to participate in the argument the original poster mentioned, I would insist that if you are going to use the strict traditional conventions, then WordPress should be rendered as Word Press, because you have eliminated a space from the phrase Word Press, not added a capital letter to the nonexistent word Wordpress.