With the 2020 presidential election coming up, you may find yourself wanting to tweet about it or to post something about it on Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram. To keep from being the recipient of criticism over an incorrect use of capitalization you need to know how to properly capitalize the term election day.
Is Election Day Capitalized?
You might skim through the pages of the GPO Style Manual, which is the guide to style for federal government publishing, and discover that the term election day should be lowercase instead of capitalizing it like so many other holidays and occasions that it lists in the manual. If you were to stop there and take this source as the final authority on how to type or write the term, then you would not discover that there are at least two other reputable sources that declare the opposite.
However, the Chicago Manual of Style suggests that the term election day should be capitalized to Election Day. Since it is a reputable and widely used guide for style, you may want to follow its guidance more so than the guidance of the government.
When deciding whether or not you will capitalize election day in your social media posts, consider that the media itself has taken a stance on this issue. The Associated Press is a professional body of American journalists and recommends that election day should be capitalized to Election Day. Interestingly, however, the same is not true for election night, which they say should be left lowercase.
To learn more about proper title capitalization rules, give our free title capitalization tool a try.