Capitalization

Follow the capitalization guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style. See Capitalization style definitions for descriptions of the capitalization styles.

The following capitalization guidelines are specific to Splunk documentation:

• Doc components
• Splunk product names, features, and components
• Concepts that are UI terms

For capitalization guidelines in the UI, see UI text style guidelines.

Capitalization for emphasis

Don't capitalize all letters in a word to show emphasis. In general, don't add formatting to text to show emphasis. If you need to emphasize important content, consider using a callout box. See Best practices for using callout boxes.

Capitalization style definitions

Most elements in Splunk documentation take sentence-style capitalization, but product names and manual titles take initial capitalizations and headline style. See Doc components to determine which style to use in Splunk documentation.

Sentence style

Sentence-style capitalization capitalizes the first word in the sentence and all proper nouns, such as product names. See the following examples:

• Deploy and manage private apps
• View organization metrics
• Splunk Web Framework components

For phrases that start with a number, such as a UI label, don't capitalize the word that follows the number. See the following examples:

Do this	Don't do this
2 active alerts	2 Active alerts
6 new features	6 New features

If a title or heading uses a colon to separate parts, or if a subheading or dashboard label uses a colon to separate a main idea from a secondary idea, capitalize the first word that follows the colon. See more examples in Colon.

Do this	Don't do this
Part 2: Edit the Collector configuration to add new components	Part 2: edit the Collector configuration to add new components
Sources contributing to false positive: Incorrect analytic logic	Sources contributing to false positive: incorrect analytic logic

Headline style

Headline-style capitalization follows these guidelines:

Guidance	Examples
Capitalize the first and last words, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions (if, because, as, that, and so on).	Distributed Search Administer Splunk Phantom
Don't capitalize articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor), the "to" in an infinitive, and prepositions (with, to, for, in, from).	Build Playbooks with the Playbook Editor Managing Indexers and Clusters of Indexers
For hyphenated words, capitalize the first element and the subsequent elements unless they are articles, prepositions, and coordinating conjunctions.	Cross-Selling Opportunities The Command-Line Interface

Doc components

For the following components in Splunk docs, use these capitalization guidelines:

Doc component	Capitalization style	Example
Manual titles	Headline style	Search Reference
Chapter titles	Sentence style	Plan Splunk apps
Headings at any level	Sentence style	Get data into Splunk Observability Cloud
List items	Sentence style	Log in with your username and password.
Column headings in a table	Sentence style	Refer to this table as an example.

Splunk product names, features, and components

Capitalize Splunk product names. In general, don't capitalize the names of features or components.

For correct capitalization of Splunk terms, see the Splexicon.

For capitalization of the parts of a Splunk product architecture, such as a heavy forwarder or a search head, see Splunk product terminology.

For capitalization within a Splunk product UI, such as whether to capitalize a button label or dialog box title, see the Capitalization section in the UI text style guidelines.

Concepts that are UI terms

Don't capitalize terms that are normally capitalized as UI terms when they refer to concepts instead. Review the following table for capitalization examples in both scenarios:

Concept	UI term
Users with admin privileges can change the server settings.	Select Settings and then Server Settings.
Identify the number of indexers in your deployment.	Select Data and then Indexers.
Create a custom deep dive to investigate the root cause of a specific issue in your IT environment.	From the ITSI main menu, select Deep Dives.