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Language and punctuation
Titles and headings
Titles are used in a number of mark-up structures in DITA. Titles are a mix of content and metadata. The mark-up in titles should be kept as simple as possible, and workarounds to achieve specific formatting outcomes should not be used.
Case in titles
Sentence case should be used for topic, section, figure, table and other titles.

Introduction
Information types and topics
Topics are the building blocks of modular documents, and organising topics by semantic information types is one of the architectural features of DITA.
DITA map files
Syntax and mark-up
Language and punctuation
- Avoiding writing for output
  Do not include formatting information in your DITA content topics.
- Stem sentences, glue text, and other transitional information
  Transitional information, such as stem sentences, is largely redundant in DITA's minimalist, topic-based, semantic mark-up architecture. The role of transitional information in contextualising the content has been eliminated through the use of smaller chunk sizes, meaningful titles, information typing, structure, and demarcation labels automatically-generated in the output.
- Punctuation in lists
  Ordered and unordered list items should have no terminating punctuation marks, such as commas, semicolons, and full stops, except when all items in a list are complete sentences. This approach maximises re-usability.
- Titles and headings
  Titles are used in a number of mark-up structures in DITA. Titles are a mix of content and metadata. The mark-up in titles should be kept as simple as possible, and workarounds to achieve specific formatting outcomes should not be used.
  - Case in titles
    Sentence case should be used for topic, section, figure, table and other titles.
  - Line breaks in titles
    There is no line break element or equivalent in DITA.
  - Where topic titles are used
    Topic titles are used to form the heading in the output deliverable document, as well as for other constructs such as link text and metadata values.
  - Crafting meaningful topic titles
    Writing accurate, concise and consistent topic titles is an important challenge for DITA authors. Guidelines for crafting title text make this task a little easier.
  - Conditional titles
    A title element in DITA does not have the normal metadata attributes used for conditional publishing. However, it is possible to carefully use conditions on elements nested within a title element.
- Crafting paragraphs
  A paragraph should contain one unit of thought or action, or main point, and should be typically three to eight sentences in length. All of the sentences in a paragraph should relate to its main point.
- Different languages
  The xml:lang attribute stores the human language of the content, and can be applied to any DITA element.
- Quotation marks
  Quotation marks should not be included in DITA content. The marks should be added, if required, during the publishing process.
Graphics and figures
Cross-referencing
Cross-references are a means of binding individual topics into a coherent and navigable document.
Content re-use
Metadata, conditional processing, and indexing
The DITA documentation process
DITA authoring concepts
Moving from style-based authoring to a structured authoring methodology such as DITA requires a radically different approach to writing.

Case in titles

Sentence case should be used for topic, section, figure, table and other titles.

It is possible to create titles for topics, figures and tables with letter case structures including the following:

start case (first letter of each word capitalised, with the remainder lower case)
all capitals
title case (first letter of the first and last words capitalised, nouns and verbs initial capitalised, with the remainder lower case)
all lower case
all lower case except the first letter
sentence case (first word and proper nouns initial capitalised, with the remainder lower case)
camel case (the first letter of each word capitalised, with spaces and punctuation removed)

Other variations are also possible, such as all lower case except nouns.

For titles in publications, the following options are the most common:

all capitals
title case
sentence case
all lower case

Title case and sentence case afford the maximum re-use possibilities, because they can be easily transformed, in the processing stage, into:

start case
all capitals
all lower case
camel case

You should use sentence case for all titles in DITA, other than publication titles. Sentence case is easier for an author to use, as it has simpler rules (first word and proper nouns must be initial capitalised).

The preceding applies to English, and may not be applicable in other languages (and writing systems) such as German, for example, where the first letter of all nouns is capitalised.