Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage is arranged a bit differently to other guides, so it took me a while to work out that the book does not appear to give explicit advice on the subject of short signs. However, the book does have some text that implicitly gives away the Cambridge University Press style:
"in the conventional sign NO ADMITTANCE."
"An official NO ENTRY sign makes access by"
"as when the sign says PROCEED WITH CAUTION rather than DRIVE CAREFULLY."
Notice the NO ENTRY version is italicized but the others are not. None of the examples I could find in the text were quoted, but all were fully uppercase.
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If they're using full caps in one place, and italicized full caps in another, they don't have a consistent style, and consistency is what a style guide should be all about.
Full caps are awful; you sometimes see small caps used for signs in running text, or in display text.
Just from a commonsense standpoint, the more you use typography or punctuation to make the sign stand out, the more important it seems--and generally, a sign doesn't deserve that level of importance; initial caps are enough.
FYI, here's the rule from Chicago, 16th edition (there's a 17th edition that I don't have, but treatment of signs is not included in the list of changes):
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8.196 SIGNS AND NOTICES
Specific wording of common short signs or notices is capitalized headline-style in running text. A longer notice is better treated as a quotation.
The door was marked Authorized Personnel Only.
She encountered the usual Thank You for Not Smoking signs.
We were disturbed by the notice "Shoes and shirt required of patrons but not of personnel."
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