When identifying a season such as Summer of 2007, should summer be capitalized?

To me, it looks better with Summer capitalized. I don’t know what the actual rule is, though.

Seasons should not be capitalized unless starting the sentence.

The capitalization seems to throw many people off. In addition to at the beginning of a sentence, there are other times when seasons should also be capitalized when:
* Personified (Oh West Wind, we appreciate your breeze)
* Part of a title (The Wild, Wild West; The Southern Tribune)
* It is part of a title (South Carolina, The North, The Fall 2010 festival)

So, the answer to the question (I think) is in how you word it. If the name of the activity included a season, then it would be capitalized. If the season is used to denote a time-frame, it would not be capitalized.

You might be better off listing the months. Most people reviewing a resume look closely at dates to account for an applicant’s time.

If the season is of particular note…something like the Summer of 1969, or the Summer of Love…then capitalization is probably also a fine call.

No.

“I participated in this activity during the summer of 2007.”

In a sentence, no. If you were listing the activity, and placing the date a few tabs to the right, then it would be capitalized.

Although personally, I think capitalizing makes more sense, since it’s being used in place of a date.

@hobbitsubculture, by that logic, we’d also write “I saw a movie Yesterday” and “I’m going away next Month.”

If a word is not a proper noun, we don’t capitalize it unless it is being used in a special way, such as in a title or at the beginning of a sentence. There’s nothing special about saying “during the summer,” whether a year is mentioned or not.

@Jeruba I had originally answered that with a bit more detail. I will add it back now. Adding the 2007 makes “summer 2007” the replacement for a proper noun that would be used in a date, such as July. Some words that aren’t proper nouns are capitalized in certain situations. This is the case with “mom” and “dad”. Since they aren’t proper nouns, they wouldn’t be capitalized if you were writing, “My mom drove me home.” However, they are capitalized in contexts where a proper noun can be substituted. “It was five o’clock when Mom drove me home.” In that situation, a name can be used in the place of “Mom”.

So basically, I think that when a season is being used as a date, it should get the same quasi-proper noun treatment as Mom and Dad.

Definitely lower case in this context.

@hobbitsubculture, thanks for your amplification. I understand your reasoning, and I still disagree. We say “Mom and Dad” when we use them as names (they’re called “kinship names” in the Chicago manual, section 8.39) and we also say “my mother and my father.” They refer to the same individuals, but because of the status of the word as proper or common (and not our regard for or interpretation of what it represents) we treat them differently.

The proper nouns get caps and the common ones don’t. A common noun does not stand for a proper noun. A pronoun stands for a noun.

About the seasons, Chicago (8.94) says:

Days of the week, months, and seasons. Names of days and months are capitalized. The four seasons are lowercased (except when used to denote an issue of a journal).

You will also find them lowercased in the dictionary.