Names that are RunTogether

[Deirdre Edgar]

... such as: Loyola ChildLaw Clinic

I'm officially tired OfThem. Why must places/companies DoThis?

[LisaMc]

They think it will make them StandOut or LookEdgy. It all ends up giving the DeskAHeadache.

Lisa

[Jim Thomsen]

But ... do we overrule them? Impose our conventional aesthetic on them?

[editer]

But ... do we overrule them? Impose our conventional aesthetic on them?

Seems like a bad approach. More defensible is to take any reasonable to use the name as little as possible.

[Gerri Berendzen]

I like what Bill Walsh says about this topic at http://www.theslot.com/webnames.html.

A lot of these things are just logos, and we're not required to match a company's logo.

I think when it gets too confusing to read, we can apply our own aesthetic, based on common sense. Loyola ChildLaw Clinic probably isn't that confusing, just annoying. But when you have a company with a letterhead that shows eight caps, three lower case and four more caps all run together in one word, I'm opting for making it three word and making it easier to read.

[Pete Zicari]

The Plain Dealer's rule is that we allow 3 to a customer, and one of the caps must be close to the beginning. Following Bill Walsh's reasoning, we're running the name for the reader's benefit, not the letterhead designer's, so a name that goes too far afield appears in a conventional spelling. Or it does when we have time to mess with it.

Sometimes you can't escape an awkward or ridiculous name, such as when the writer or someone more important than you insists it can't be changed. In a lot of cases, you can leave the first and remove all the other instances of the name from the story, substituting indirect references or pronouns. You'd be surprised at how much easier to read the story becomes.

[Maurreen]

Also bad are the names with zero capital letters.

Most of the time, unless it's something well known, I draw the line.

They get one capital. If I had my way, it would be at the beginning of the word, but it will at least be near there.

Repeating a mess is not helpful to the reader.