When it comes to capitalization, there are few words that cause more confusion than school subjects. Such words are usually lowercased, unless the subjects themselves are proper nouns. That’s the case with any language that is being studied: French, English, German, Spanish. It also applies to an area of study that focuses on a particular country, such as American history or Japanese art. Other subjects — trigonometry, chemistry, geography, biology, civics, drama, etc. are all lowercased.

The confusion arises when we move from writing about academic disciplines to specific courses that might be offered by a college or high school. If I want to talk about such courses, which often have numbers or letters associated with them, I put them in uppercase: Political Science 101, Algebra II, Anthropology 250B. However, some courses don’t include numbers or letters. When I served on the adjunct faculty at Columbus State Community College, I taught a course called Language Development. The course that followed mine was titled Beginning Composition. A reader seeing these course names in a sentence might think they should be lowercased, and in the following sentence, they should be:

In my first year of college, I struggled with language development, which made it hard to get through beginning composition.

Since we are only speaking generally about language development and beginning composition, those terms should remain in lowercase. If I want to talk about them as the names of specific courses, I should clarify that is what they are at the outset.

In my first year of college, I struggled in my Language Development course, which made it hard to succeed in the course that followed, Basic Composition.

In some cases, a writer might not clarify whether she is talking about a course or an academic discipline. No harm is likely to be done as long as the writer is consistent in using uppercase or lowercase letters.

I enjoyed sociology/Sociology in high school, which is why I look forward to taking sociology/Sociology in college.

Sometimes confusion can arise over the capitalization of academic degrees, although the rules here are clear. Academic degrees should be capitalized when they are abbreviated: M.A., LL.D., Ph.D., B.A. However, they are lowercased when they are spelled out: master of arts, doctor of philosophy, bachelor of science. The only time spelled-out academic degrees are uppercased is when they follow a name, as they might in a commencement program: Jake Johnson, Doctor of Philosophy; Ann Jones, Doctor of Laws; Bob Allen, Bachelor of Arts.

I could easily have ten more posts on capitalization, but I’ll conclude with just one more, which will deal with periods of time, including historical epochs.