These are the words you don’t capitalize in AP style

Capitalization looks fancy and makes things seem important. But if you’re following AP style, chances are you’re overusing those big letters. The rule of thumb in AP style is that things should be lowercased unless a rule indicates that they’re upper. Lower is default; upper is special.

Of course, you’ll want to keep using capitals for all the basics: the beginning of every sentence, proper nouns like names and specific locations, days of the week and months. But here are a few things you might not realize are actually lowercase in AP style.