Lawyers have a terrible habit of Overusing Capitalization. This goes for pleadings, discovery requests, briefs, you name it. Exuberant capitalization is the “cop talk” of legal writing.

For those prone to over-capitalization, the Evanston Township, Illinois, high school has a great primer on capitalization. Litigators capitalize some other words, like Plaintiff and Defendant, by convention, but many get carried away.

Capitalize the name of a document only when you are referring to a specific document. “complaint,” “counterclaim,” “third-party complaint,” and similar terms are sufficiently generic that you never need to capitalize them.

For any delicate questions of capitalization, as well as other fine points of legal style, Bryan Garner’s Redbook is an excellent legal writer’s reference.

A List Apart has a great article on using special characters in HTML. According to the article, decimal codes are the way to go, and you shouldn’t trust FrontPage and Dreamweaver to insert the correct character codes for viewing across browsers.

The article also goes into an illustration–well worth reading–on the differences between hyphens, em dashes, and en dashes, and how to use each:

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