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western or Western - (Jul/17/2010 )

Hello everyone!

I am writing a thesis now and something is confusing me. I have always written W of "Western blot" in capital letters even if it is in the middle of a sentence because I thought this is what I see the most. Anyway, some colleagues corrected it to "western" with no capitals. I tried to search in google but everyone says contradictory things.
What are your ideas?

Thanks!

-cellgene-

Small letters are fine.

However, no one will really care if you write capital letters I think.
But if your thesisadvisors are telling you to write small letters: then write small letters... (hell they have to give you points...)


Southern blot is with capital letter since its derived from the inventors name: Southern Edwin.

-pito-

A Southern blot is capitalized, because Southern is a man's name (the method was invented by Edwin Southern). The rest of them should be written in lower case.

That said, each journal has its own rules, and you should follow what they require. Much of the confusion comes, I think, from the fact that compass points are sometimes capitalized in English, when they refer to a geographical location (such as "the Northern part of the United States"), but are lower case when used as a direction ("We drove north").

-HomeBrew-

cellgene on Jul 17 2010, 09:08 AM said:

Hello everyone!

I am writing a thesis now and something is confusing me. I have always written W of "Western blot" in capital letters even if it is in the middle of a sentence because I thought this is what I see the most. Anyway, some colleagues corrected it to "western" with no capitals. I tried to search in google but everyone says contradictory things.
What are your ideas?

Thanks!


I remember it was a lively discussion more than a year ago -before the crash of the server, so may be you will find it in the archive;

there was no consensus about writing Western or western; as an adjective you write it w/o a capital, as an analogue and fictive surname to (Edwin) Southern you will write it with capital; I prefer to write it with a capital...

-Inmost sun-

Google does not always give the correct cluessmile.png

-HunterThomosn-