Which is correct?
The CEO is often the _______ of the company.
a. President
b. president

Answer: b.

Explanation:
You only capitalize words like “president” when they are placed in front of a name to serve as a title. So you would write “President Obama,” but “The president’s name is Barack Obama.” In the case of Romney? Let’s not put those words together.

Jane Straus explains capitalization for job titles in more detail.

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Explanation:
Job titles are capitalized when they’re placed before a person’s name, and not capitalized when they come after, so neither of these sentences is incorrect. However, when a job title is on the long side, it’s better to place it after the name, just to avoid having such a long string of capitalized words, which can start to seem silly.

@GrammarGirl has a good post on capitalization. Here’s a snippet:

“Sometimes you can simplify through capitalization. For example, a case can be made for capitalization in some business writings as a type of shorthand. “Let me check with our Legal employees,” one might write [with “legal” capitalized]. It’s clear, in corporate America, that this means the Legal Department. And one can forgive a shortening there, because if you’ve ever dealt with Legal, you want to save as much time elsewhere as possible.
If you lowercase “legal” in that sentence — “Let me check with our legal employees” – it might leave your audience wondering about the lawfulness of your other staff, the ones who aren’t legal. Hmmm. That might explain why your staplers keep disappearing.”

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Answer: b.

Explanation:
This was kind of a trick question. You’d probably expect units of measurement named for people to be capitalized but that’s not the case. Like other units of measurement, “watt” is only capitalized as the symbol, “W.”

Here are a few other examples:

The tesla (T), the standard unit of magnetic flux density, is named for Nikola Tesla.

The newton (N), the SI unit of force, is named for Sir Isaac Newton.

The pascal (Pa), the unit of pressure, is named for Blaise Pascal.

The henry (H), the Standard International (SI) unit of inductance, is named for Joseph Henry.

 *****

NIST provides Essentials of the SI: Base & derived units.

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b. fourth of July

Answer: a.

Explanation:

In the U.S., writers capitalize “fourth” in “Fourth of July” because it’s a special date. Although the official name of the holiday is “Independence Day,” we capitalize “fouth” to identify it with the holiday, so readers realize it has some significance. In this case, hackers thought it would be an especially swell day to attack a government website.

Of course, you only capitalize the Fourth if you’re either writing for a U.S. audience or making some reference to the U.S. holiday. We would capitalize in this case wherever we were because it’s significant that the attackers chose Independence Day to target government websites. If we were writing for, say, a British audience about some unrelated event that just happened to take place on the fourth of July, we would not capitalize “fourth.”

Here’s a little joke I stole from BigMitch:

Q: Do they have the Fourth of July in England?

A: No, they just go straight from the third to the fifth.

End of joke, as my mom would say: Laugh here.

Admittedly, Big Mitch’s blog isn’t really about writing. If you’re looking for more grammar, here are some additional capitalization rules.

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“Cindy-Loo Who* is an Executive with a passion for Leadership. A Writer, Speaker, Consultant, Coach, Mother, Wife, & seeker of wisdom.”

Oh Random and whimsical Capitalization — there You are again. There are rules as to what should be capitalized and what should not. When you just randomly capitalize words that strike you as important, it makes you look less intelligent than you may wish. The situation’s even worse when you’re capitalizing words that you are using to refer to yourself, because it sounds like you’re trying to make yourself sound especially important. “Less intelligent” in combination with “self-aggrandizing” is probably not the effect you’re aiming for in a Twitter profile.

 Purdue Owl provides a nice, concise explanation of the rules of capitalization.

I was just finishing up another post when I came across the profile I quote above and felt compelled to do my little bit to help stamp out random capitalization. The profile also made me wonder: Why “speaker” and not “seeker”? Why, given everything that IS capitalized, would you not capitalize “passion” and “wisdom”? In this writer’s system, are those qualities relatively unimportant or does the writer follow some odd rule that we’re unaware of? That’s the problem with random capitalization — aside from making a lot of people dismiss you at first glance — it doesn’t express your meaning in the way you intend. That’s why you need to learn the rules and then follow them because all writers — OK, most writers — have agreed at least implicitly that we follow certain rules so that we can express ourselves and be understood as well as possible.

OK, just one more gripe — referring to oneself by name always sounds pompous and, frankly, a little unstable. Cindy-Loo Who*, I’m talking to you. For your own sake, please edit your profile.

*Name changed to protect the privacy of the individual, Random Capitalizer though s/he may be. I left everything else pretty much the same in the hopes that Cindy* might recognize the profile and edit accordingly.

In ________________, David Segal wrote that his previous column had made readers scrutinize their cell phone bills — and that many found fraudulent charges: They’d been crammed.

a. The New York Times
b. the New York Times

Answer: It depends on your guide.

Explanation:
The Chicago Manual of Style prefers lower case for articles (a, an, the) beginning newspaper names but AP style is to capitalize them if they’re part of the publication’s name. If you follow a particular guide, follow its guidelines. If you’re not constrained to a guide, you just have to follow the universal rule: Decide what your own rule is and be consistent.

More on that cell phone billing scam:

The Haggler, AKA David Segal, reports: Cellphone Cramming Gets a Second Look.

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Explanation:
When you refer to a previously mentioned organization generically, use capitalization to formalize the reference.

Jane Straus explains rules for capitalization.

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Answer: a

Explanation: In general, the current style for both Web and Internet is to capitalize. See more writing style standards here.

However, some publications no longer capitalize either word. Tony Long reported in 2004 that, for the purposes of Wired, It’s Just the “internet” Now.

Answer: b

Explanation: When title and name are separated by a comma, the title is not capitalized. Capitalize a title if it and the name are used together (President Barack Obama).

Answer: b
When a direction is used as the name for an area, it’s considered a proper name and capitalized. If used simply to indicate a direction, the words north, south, east, and west are not capitalized. For example, you would write:”Go west on Front Street.”