(10 Most Important Comma Usage Rules.)

Numerous English rules govern when we must capitalize words in articles or books. Although the more basic capitalization rules are relatively clear-cut, confusion can still sometimes arise about when to capitalize words in certain circumstances. These are the most important English capitalization rules to abide by. 

First Letters in Sentences

The most basic capitalization rule is that the first words in sentences must always start with capital letters. That is perhaps the strictest and most universal capitalization rule for which there is no exception. There’s not much more that can be said about this rule, except perhaps not to confuse semicolons to be the same as full stops (periods). You should not usually capitalize the first word after a semicolon (unless it’s a proper noun, formal title, or abbreviation) because it doesn’t start a new sentence like a period does.

Proper Nouns

A proper noun is a specific name for a person, place, or thing. The general capitalization rule for proper nouns is that the first letters in their words must be capitalized. These are some examples of capitalized proper nouns:

• Epic Games Launcher (software name)
• Apple Inc (company name)
• Alexander Hamilton (person name)
• Church of England (Christian church name)
• St. Peter’s Basilica (cathedral name)
• Republican Party (political party name)
• Mississippi River (a river name)
• Grand Canyon (canyon name)
• Italy (country name)
• Pacific Ocean (ocean name)
• U.S. Department of Defense (organization name)
• New York City (city name)

The principal words in proper nouns, like those above, should be capitalized. Exceptions are made for conjunctions (such as and, but, or, etc.) and short prepositions (in, at, on, to, for, by, etc.) included within the proper nouns. Thus, the preposition in the Church of England is not capitalized.

However, the capitalization of proper nouns is more of a general rule (rather than a strict one) because of the increasing number of companies releasing products with names that don’t start with uppercase letters. Apple is perhaps the most guilty culprit of expanding this rising (and frankly unwelcome) lowercase marketing trend with its iPhone, iPad, iMac, iPod, and macOS products. Those proper nouns for some Apple products have unique and awkward capitalization. When it comes to products, we must capitalize them exactly as Apple and company do on their websites and marketing materials.

Another point to note is that general food and drink names are common nouns rather than proper ones. Thus, food names like banana, tea, cheese, apple, milk, chocolate, chips, sandwich, and crisps should not be capitalized. However, brand names for foods should be capitalized, such as Tabasco sauce, Hellman’s mayonnaise, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and Heinz Tomato Ketchup.

Derivatives of Proper Nouns

A derivative is a word formed from another word. The many derivatives of proper nouns should always be capitalized in much the same way. For example, Russian, Christian, Germanic, and Venetian are capitalized derivatives for Russia, Christianity, German, and Venice.

The I Pronoun

I is a personal pronoun, which refers to I, myself, that must always be capitalized. That is the only pronoun we must always capitalize because of its unique single-letter nature. So, don’t forget to press the Shift key when entering the I pronoun in articles with a first-person narrative.

Title and Subheading Capitalization

English capitalization rules for titles and subheadings can be more confusing because alternative style guides (such as The Associated Press Stylebook and The Chicago Manual of Style) have slightly different conventions for them. The general rule is that nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs in titles should have capital letters. It is not necessary to capitalize coordinate conjunctions (and, but, for, etc), articles (an, the, a), and shorter propositions in titles. That is the traditional title case rule for capitalizing the principal words in headings.

These are some examples of title case headings:

• “9 of the Most Important English Capitalization Rules”
• “What Are Software Articles (and Who Writes Them)?”
• “10 Handy Digital Tools for Freelance Writers”
• “Inside the Third Reich”

Yet, the rules for title and subheading capitalization are slightly loose, with different style guides having variable preferences. If you prefer Associated Press, then stick to that style guide for your titles. Or, you can capitalize titles and subheadings in your articles according to the Chicago Manual. Capitalization consistency is most important for titles and subheadings. You can utilize this Title Case Converter online tool to ensure heading and subheading capitalization consistency for your preferred style.

Formal Titles

Words like president, director, king, pope, and doctor are common nouns that should not have capital letters when they stand alone. However, this changes when formal titles directly precede proper noun names. Formal titles must be capitalized when preceding person names, as in these examples:

• President Trump
• Pope Leo XIV
• King Charles II
• Vice President Vance
• Director General Tim Davie

Historic Events and Eras

Historical eras were notable periods that had significant changes and events. The historical events were typically wars, but can also be other significant revolutionary, economic, or social occurrences in history. We should always capitalize specifically named historic eras and events, such as the following:

• World War II
• Renaissance
• Industrial Revolution
• Russian Revolution
• Great Crash of 1929
• Ancient Egypt
• American Civil War

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Abbreviations are shortened forms of words that should be capitalized when used for abbreviated titles. For example, Mr. and Ms. are two common title abbreviations for mister and miss that are always capitalized when standing alone or preceding surnames. Jan., Feb., Mar., and Apr. are abbreviations capitalized like their full month names, January, February, March, and April. However, we don’t capitalize Latin abbreviations such as e.g. (for example), etc. (for et cetera, which translates to the rest), and i.e. (for that is).

An acronym is a special type of abbreviation that’s a pronounceable word formed from a longer phrase or proper noun. For example, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group), UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), and RAM (Random Access Memory) are some common acronyms. Such acronyms should be fully capitalized with all uppercase letters, like the preceding examples in this passage.

Capitalization Within Quotes

Quotations are frequently used in the middle of sentences. When quoting any complete sentence, you must always start the quotation with a capital letter, even from mid-sentence. However, we can make exceptions for partial quotes that are not full sentences. Here are a few examples of full and partial quotes:

• In his “Sinews of Peace” speech, Churchill stated, “An Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”
• Nixon said he was “not a crook” when asked about Watergate during a press conference.
• Mr. Chamberlain said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again,” when he departed for the Munich Conference.

So, don’t forget those most significant English capitalization rules for your articles or books. We must abide by those rules of capitalization because they help readers identify proper nouns, the I pronoun, abbreviations, and title headings. Correct capitalization will also enhance clarity and consistency in your articles, books, letters, emails, and other documents.

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(How to Write Better Titles.)

In a Writer Unboxed article, author Barbara Linn Probst explores the art of crafting compelling book titles. Her reflections primarily draw from fiction. However, her insights prompted me to revisit the often-circuitous journey I experienced in naming my two memoirs. Unlike fiction, memoirs often carry the weight of personal significance. My memoir Open Turns: From Dutch Girl to New Australian, a story about being a young immigrant swimmer in Australia, demanded a deep dive into my adolescence. Finding its name proved to be almost as daunting.

Naming my first memoir When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew, about my childhood in WWII Amsterdam, was a breeze in comparison. I was a little girl whose adoring daddy was deported to a German labor camp, and whose mother joined the Resistance and hid a Jewish girl, who became like an older sister.

Allowing that little girl’s voice to guide the telling of my story felt like a gift. Who could not love a five-year-old who witnesses her foster sister being dragged out of her home, her mother held at gunpoint, suffers near starvation, and almost loses her life in a mass shooting when celebrating freedom? 

I cried as I wrote her story. She reminded me of the imagination and belief in miracles that helped me survive the darkness––when my father and I imagined that a toy dog could become a wolf, and when a “miracle moon” lit up the icy path along the canals to guide my mother and me home before the Nazi curfew might get us shot. The story named itself. 

When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew ends with my family boarding the immigrant ship that will take us to our new life in Australia. It won many awards. Readers demanded a sequel. And I wrote Open Turns: From Dutch Girl to New Australian. The ship has set sail.

At first, I wondered how a memoir about a teenage immigrant girl in the 1950s could be of interest to readers today. I was 13 years old when I left behind my friends and the swimming club where I belonged. Traumatized by war experiences, but armed with big plans and dreams, my younger teenage self would challenge me as I began to write her story. But I recognized and liked her willful strength and resilience.

As a family therapist, I have witnessed many clients face major life changes. Whether brought on by death, divorce, physical ailments, or loss of home through fire or flood, they needed that same human resilience and courage to hope in their effort to adapt to a new reality. I saw that my story was not just the narrative of an adolescent displaced girl, but the story of each one of us trying to navigate our way in a complex world. What inner hopes and intentions do we draw on as we face the inevitable twists and turns in our life journeys?

I devote a chapter in my book to a powerful memory of my father taking me for a walk in the Mallee scrub desert shortly after our arrival in Australia. I was angry and confused, suffering from nightmares. But under a darkening evening sky the stars had begun to flicker and a million lights formed a sparkling dome. With my hand in his, I found myself in a cosmic cathedral. And in that deep stillness, I heard the voice of that timeless land. Then, “Look,” my dad said pointing to the Southern Cross I had wanted to see. “We are all part of this. It’s all interconnected.”

His awe and reverence for the vast mystery of nature and the cosmos opened a traumatized teenager’s heart, and I, the older writer of her story, searched for a title that would reflect the power of that opening that helped her adapt to her totally new life. 

I ran different titles by friends and colleagues, even family in Australia, who said, “I don’t think you are quite there yet.” My editor Krissa at She Writes Press sent me suggestions that included terms used in swimming.

As a young state champion swimmer in Australia my strongest strokes were the butterfly and breaststroke, which demanded that at the end of each length of the pool, I place both hands firmly on the wall, tuck my knees under, turn and push off with all my strength. It is called an “Open Turn” in the swimming world, and it’s the way I have envisioned many a challenging turning point in my own long life. Those transitions, those times when we must take a breath and access the inner strength and resilience to face the next length, the unknown future, with hope and determination.

My book found its name. Open Turns: From Dutch Girl to New Australian. What’s in a name? Well, a whole story, of course.

Check out Hendrika de Vries’ Open Turns here:

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(The Book That Broke My Heart.)

While my Unhooked cover was orange with block white and yellow lettering, this other Unhooked was yellow with block white letters. Was it an AI knockoff, a phenomenon colleagues had been complaining about lately? Googling, I discovered my project was not the victim of artificial intelligence, at least not the virtual kind. Rather a West Coast self-help guru’s upcoming addiction hardcover had the same title, white print and fishing hook design against a plain background as mine. So I did what any author would do upon finding their baby has been kidnapped: I freaked!

In the writing biz for decades, I knew titles could not be copyrighted. The moniker “Unhooked” had previously been used, at one point for an investigation of sexual hookups, though I’d never seen an identical title, cover design, coloring, AND topic as mine before.

In the past I’d sold books to bigger publishers—including an earlier addiction memoir Lighting Up, about how I’d quit smoking, drinking, and drugs 23 years ago. I’d hoped making my sobriety public would make it stick—and it did. After telling my own story, Unhooked became my first collaborative health book, a little labor of loyalty, to share the wisdom of my substance abuse specialist, a father figure who’d been in the field 30 years. He’d guided me through “the substance shuffle” where, after I quit one bad habit, I’d immediately find another. “Everything is too important to you,” he’d warned. It was! I’d been so thrilled when our project landed on the New York Times bestseller list (for two weeks), garnered good reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, foreign editions in Spanish, Korean, and Chinese, and wound up helping other addicts. I became addicted to 13 years of royalty checks.

Yet now, as everyone was resolving to quit their compulsions in January, I was getting unhinged over Unhooked, my impatient personality becoming addicted to Google-stalking. I found the email to contact the author. Subtle as always—but trying to be calm and polite—I asked why he was using the exact name and fishhook motif as my addiction book which was still alive and in print. Hadn’t he tried Googling?

After all, it was an easy mistake. Pre-internet, when I’d once shown my agent my new humor project How to Stay Single Forever, she went to her shelves to pull out the humor book How to Stay Single Forever. (I immediately revised my title and concept.) Ever since then, as a longtime writing professor, the first thing I told my classes to do when they came up with a pitch—even for a newspaper or magazine piece—was to check if it’s been done before. It often had. 

While concurrent concepts weren’t uncommon, you could easily revise, making the words, execution, or angle your own. Finishing a 2010 novel Overexposure, seeing that word had been taken as a title for another work of fiction, I switched its moniker to OverexposED. Why couldn’t this West Coaster have at least added a gerund to make his UnhookING, tried black type, or an original motif that didn’t so closely mirror a successful book already out there?

I expected him to be shocked to learn he’d inadvertently used both my title and design, apologize for the obvious mistaken overlap, and/or offer to alter something so we weren’t cover twins. Hours later he answered that he had indeed Googled Unhooked, but since my book came out in 2012 from a small press and “only had 148 reviews on Amazon,” he didn’t think my project had enough “presence” to matter. “To be honest,” he added, “I would imagine that what will actually happen is that your book will get a sales bump from my marketing push.”

My stomach sunk. So it wasn’t by accident? Laying claim to the title, picture and layout I’d created in 2012, which he admitted knowing about, he felt entitled to recycle my previously published cover because it was from a smaller company? And he thought he was doing me a favor?

It reminded me of the former student who’d repost the obscure poems, articles, and quotes I displayed on my social media pages with no attribution. When I suggested the ethical way to copy someone else’s creation verbatim was to credit them, share it from their page with their tag, or at least comment, “This is great! Reposting,” she asked, “Why?” Then, after taking my popular $500 5-week Zoom class on publishing essays, she launched the exact same 5-week online essay class for $499.

As an English major turned literary critic who didn’t grow up with computer culture, I’d always found the web to be a problematic wild west of plagiarism, where lifting ideas was normalized and younger people didn’t even pretend not to. Several undergrads in my courses had taken long paragraphs from Wikipedia verbatim, not knowing they had to use quotes and cite it as their source, as if everything electronically transmitted could be recklessly appropriated for free, regardless of bylines, boundaries, and the concept of intellectual property. Yet seeing Unhooked recycled felt personal, like I was over, and my livelihood and 40 years of hard work was up for grabs by the slyest usurper. This brazen, slippery cyber-stealing made me crave a joint, drink, and cigarette.

Emailing my agent, book editor, and literary lawyer, they advised me to check if any material inside this upcoming Unhooked also overlapped (though I hadn’t read it yet). If not, they explained we’d have to argue he’d used the same “trade dress on the design” that made them indistinguishable which—they feared—couldn’t be legally proven with conviction—since there was a different subtitle and author’s name (his). What a depressing way to start the new year.

While I wasn’t imbibing, toking, or overeating, I couldn’t stop obsessively researching the younger male “mental health expert” on the opposite coast. I questioned his “#1 bestselling author” presence, since his only previous book was self-published (with 248 Amazon reviews) which, he said, sold 5,000 copies. My Unhooked sold so well they’d turned it into a hardcover with subsequent reissues that were not the least bit dead, I told him competitively, adding that it had been linked to a Washington Post recovery piece I’d published just the week before.

Perusing L.A. guru’s personal blog, my substance abuse platform suddenly seemed softer. He’d chronicled how, like Walter in Breaking Bad, he’d been addicted to meth, using 500 dollars of methamphetamine a day for three years (dwarfing my measly pot, tobacco, and rum and Tab dependencies). While I’d once accidentally smoked crack with a bus driver, he’d been arrested by a full-on SWAT team of 12 cops for dealing crystal meth, woke up handcuffed in the hospital after being caught in possession with a half a pound of cocaine, spent a year in jail and a year in rehab. When he couldn’t get hired because of his criminal history, he wound up with a PhD. (I’d merely shoplifted candles and completed a masters.) In the dramatic addiction Olympics, he took the cake (or coke, as it were).

On Instagram he’d broadcast such pseudo-spiritual message balloons as “Hang in there, it gets better,” “Life is simple,” “Stay kind,” “It’s not a problem, it’s a reality,” and “Fuck Shame,” unveiling shirtless pics of himself on the beach. He posted multiple bikini shots of his wife—a “health and wellness expert” influencer, raw food chef, and yoga teacher, and their photogenic kids. (Alas, my East Coast professor husband shunned social media and preferred bacon cheeseburgers.) The guru’s wife even wrote a piece about how her husband had been a sex addict too. Maybe he should have relaunched my memoir instead?

Frustrated, I asked for advice from my women’s journalism groups on social media about how to handle this self-helping facsimile. Several said how common this problem was, mentioned lawsuits and compensations they’d won, commenting that my original cover was classier and that karma was on my side. Two kind former students took pity on me and belatedly rated my Unhooked, so my page now had 150 Amazon reviews—and counting.

Over an emergency phone shrink session, I struggled for an insightful overview. Taking advice from my own pages, I ended up scrawling a list of what I was grateful for: When my Unhooked first came out, it performed better than I’d expected. Therapy allowed me to break through my bad habits and emotional barriers so I could publish several more books my family hated, with two new projects in the pipeline. 

As I started another turn around the sun clean and sober, I decided I was unhooking from Unhooked. I told my students that writing was a way to turn your worst experiences into the most beautiful. I focused on how I’d miraculously transformed my smoke, booze, and bong addictions into book deals—a feat nobody could take away, and a healthier replacement still worth celebrating.

Check out Susan Shapiro’s Unhooked here:

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(The 7 Rules of Picking Names for Fictional Characters.)

In the early drafts of my latest novel, Sing, I, many of these transcribed scenes depicted a secondary character, Nikki. Nikki was a thinly-veiled version of Nicole, a friend and San Francisco Bay Area singer and musician who died more than a decade ago. As hard as I tried to bring Nikki to life on the page as someone both in memory of and separate to Nicole, she insisted on remaining true to the identity of her real-life inspiration. A mirroring, as it turned out, that did not suit the story my novel existed to tell. 

It wasn’t until I changed Nikki’s name to Lily that I freed the character from the limits I’d inadvertently placed on her and allowed her to organically reveal herself and her story. The powerful results from her name change impressed on me once again the mysteries to writing and the alchemy to names.

I revisited every other name in Sing, I, including its title, chapter titles, and place names, to ensure I’d gotten them right. I especially examined my choice to name the main character Ester Prynn—a near namesake to Hester Prynne, the protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Because I’ve long hated my own name, also a namesake, I knew firsthand the wealth of tension such a layered moniker could evoke. Plus, the allusion to The Scarlet Letter underscored Sing, I’s themes of guilt, shame, othering, and patriarchy. But was this another instance where my inserting a trope too close to my lived experience didn’t serve the story? 

I continued revising the novel with an open imagination, willing to change my protagonist’s name if needed. Happily, the weight and import of Ester Prynn’s name proved essential to her character and her story. Moreover, I credit the writing of Sing, I, and in particular Ester’s evolutionary relationship to herself, with shifting my negative perspective on my own name.

Check out Ethel Rohan’s Sing, I here:

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Growing up in nationalist Ireland, in a working-class north Dublin neighborhood, the unusual name of Ethel coupled with its English origins subjected me to constant and often cruel attention. My mother almost named me Celine, but worried people would nickname me silly. Christened Ethel Celine, I heard in my head Ethel Silly. My mother placed emphasis on my being named after her great aunt and my great-great aunt. From which I intuited pressure to be better than I was. Ethel also means noble. Cue more duress. 

In stark contrast to such lofty associations, I was nicknamed Nettle and Kettle by the local boys. There were also countless references to random grannies named Ethel, Ethel from I Love Lucy, and Ethel the Elephant, whoever she was. I reached a point in my teens where whenever someone said my name, especially at volume, I flinched. It is not hyperbole then to say that I found Ester Prynn’s journey of self-empowerment over the course of Sing, I life-changing. Inspired by Ester, and by several more of the novel’s characters who came to embrace every facet of themselves, I reclaimed my name from those I had allowed to twist and devalue it, myself included, and have since refashioned it into a name with positive and potent properties.

Because I’m now obsessing on writers as serial name givers, I reached out to other authors on the topic and am pleased to share below brief takes from Katie M. Flynn, R. O. Kwon, Manjula Martin, Sasha Vasilyuk, and Brandi Wells on the power and consequences of names, naming, and withholding names.

Katie M. Flynn, author of Island Rule, Scout Press, March 2024

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In my interconnected short story collection, Island Rule, some characters are never referred to by their names, but rather by their roles in the lives of others or by a quality perceived as defining. For example, in the story “Us, Being the Org, Being Us,” the narrator refers to her partner exclusively as “My Boyfriend.” This metonymy reflects how she thinks of him, solely in relation to herself. 

I like to accentuate this reductive way of perceiving others through capitalization, as in the case of another story in the collection, “The Single Friend.” At a dinner party, the narrator of this story hears an old friend refer to her as “you know, the Single Friend.” It has become her defining quality, “the one who prefers to be alone,” and the name sticks. It sticks so hard that it becomes a prison the narrator can’t escape. It’s fascinating, and edifying, this determining power of naming and not naming.

R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit, Riverhead Books, May 2024

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I write under a different name than I use elsewhere. With the writing I publish, I’m R. O. Kwon. I’m Okyong to my parents and some Korean relatives, and Reese otherwise. The writing-related split came about because Reese is a nickname, and, though I’d have loved to publish as Okyong, it’s not a name most non-Koreans can pronounce. Nor is it a question of will: Even people I love who have known me for years can’t get “Okyong” right, which makes sense. There’s plenty in other languages I can’t pronounce. 

It’s also true that, when I’m writing, if I’m really in it, I don’t entirely feel that it’s coming from me. I feel closer to being a medium, asking—and often begging—a novel to trust me enough to let me try to put its life into words. I appreciate having a separate name under which I can publish anything so inherently mysterious and bewildering and not quite mine as a book.

Manjula Martin, author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, Pantheon Books, January 2024

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The name of my latest book, The Last Fire Season, came to me easily and early. Because my own birth name has a somewhat complex backstory, I like a name that resonates without explanation, but also has the potential to carry deeper meanings. The Last Fire Season, for me, does that. The title references the fact that, because of climate change, there is no longer a distinct fire season. In the Western US, it is now called a fire year. But the title is less a pun on fire terminology and more of a challenge. It questions a worldview in which the current mega-fires are easily categorized as anomalous events or temporal disasters. In fact, fire is not seasonal. It’s ever present and foundational, in both the natural and human world (which are the same things). My book is in part about how I came to understand that.

The most difficult part of naming my book was actually the subtitle. Subtitles are de rigueur in nonfiction. They’re important marketing tools, a way to embed keywords and search terms in a book’s online presence. I have found my book to be difficult to summarize, let alone boil down to a few keywords. The memoir weaves together two main threads: Life amid wildfires fueled by the climate crisis, and my experience living with chronic pain, the result of a reproductive health crisis. My own struggle to put words and narrative arcs to those experiences—to, in effect, name them—is woven throughout the book.

After filling many pages of notebooks with awkward, often cliched subtitles—there was a lot of “…in a burning world“—I returned to my shelf of nature books, including the work of writers like Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and Jamaica Kincaid. I noticed many nature memoirs use a play on the term “natural history” in their subtitles. In my book, I had come up with this compound term, pyronatural history, to denote natural histories concerning fire. Knowing my main title had a bit of a commercial feel to it (“The Last __” is a common title construction) I wanted the subtitle to telegraph to readers that this is a literary work. I figured a good way to do that is to use a made-up word!

Sasha Vasilyuk, author of Your Presence is Mandatory, Bloomsbury Publishing, April 2024

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The name of my debut novel’s main character—Yefim Shulman—plays such a central role the German edition of Your Presence is Mandatory is titled Our Father’s Good Name. As a soldier in Nazi Germany, Yefim is forced to conceal his Jewish surname and assume a Slavic one instead. This was a common practice for captured Soviet Jews and one of the main reasons some of them survived.

Naming characters and places became a very delicate issue for me as I edited Your Presence is Mandatory during Russia’s war in Ukraine. Because this is a story of a Ukrainian family that spans from WWII until the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, there is a lot of sensitivity to which language—Russian or Ukrainian—is being used to write about Ukraine. For decades, Ukrainian was suppressed in favor of Russian. In fact, my grandparents, who inspired this novel, were born speaking Ukrainian but by the time I knew them, they only spoke Russian. In my edits, I had to decide which language my characters were more likely to speak at each point and how to spell names of places depending on the era and the geography. It was a delicate dance between being historically accurate and restoring some linguistic justice.

My author name is another testament to the complicated history of the region. I inherited my grandmother’s Ukrainian last name instead of my grandfather’s Jewish name because of a resurgence of antisemitism during the last year of Stalin’s life when my father was born. To safeguard his future, my grandparents gave him the name Vasilyuk, which passed down to me. On my desk, I keep my grandmother’s memoir and my father’s books (he was a psychologist and wrote poetry)—both Vasilyuks—and it feels like a true honor to add to the writerly legacy of our name.

Brandi Wells, author of The Cleaner, Hanover Square Press, January 2024

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Most of the characters in The Cleaner have nicknames based on what’s in or around their work desks. There’s Yarn Guy, Leftovers, Cheery #1 and Cheery #2, Resume Woman, Sad Intern, and Mr. Buff. There’s also the Rogue Shitter and Sticky Doorknob. The cleaner can’t be certain which of the desks that she cleans belongs to them but she thinks she’s homing in on the answer. 

These nicknames are part of the narrator’s storytelling—she invents characters for her lonely nights and these nicknames help bring them to life. I do this in my own life, because I’m terrible with names. I knew a classmate as “hat guy” for years. But these nicknames, both in fiction and in life, create an ironic kind of intimacy, a way of seeing and knowing that feels important to me. 

To ascribe someone a nickname based on their characteristics is a declaration that you have noticed them, that you remember them. But it’s also a declaration of self: “Here is the nickname that I gave you” and in seeing this nickname, you know something about what I notice and value. You start to know me.

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