Capitalization

Guidelines for capitalization in Splunk documentation, including product names, UI terms, and general style rules.

The following capitalization guidelines are specific to Splunk documentation:

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

For everything else, follow the capitalization guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style.

See Capitalization style definitions for descriptions of the capitalization styles.

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 an admonition. See Admonitions and text callouts.

Capitalization style definitions

Scenarios for applying sentence-style and headline-style capitalization in Splunk documentation, including examples and rules for titles, headings, and hyphenated words.

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

Sentence-style capitalization

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 heading 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 capitalization

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

Guidelines for capitalization in Splunk documentation components, including guides, chapter titles, headings, list items, and table column headings.

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

Doc component Capitalization style Example
Name of a guide or a documentation set Headline style Search Reference
Chapter titles Sentence style Plan Splunk apps
Headings at any level Sentence style Get data into Splunk Observability Cloud
Unordered or ordered list items Sentence style
  • Filter the list

  • Use custom tags

  • See key performance metrics

  • Change the time period

Column headings in a table Sentence style Refer to this table as an example.

Splunk product names, features, and components

Guidelines for capitalizing Splunk product names, features, and components, with references for correct usage in product architecture and user interface.

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 in the UI .

Concepts that are UI terms

Guidelines for capitalizing terms when used as concepts versus UI elements.

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.

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