The Owners' Manual | Issue 13 | Summer 2018

You’ve heard the adage,“Words matter.” And, of course, they do. What you write in an e-mail, a report, a contract, a letter is critically important. But did you know that capitalization matters as well? Typically, in legal documents you will see what are known as “defined terms.” This means that a word has been given a special meaning in that document; it has been defined. An example is in our Letter Proposal. For those of you who do not write contracts, the Letter Proposal is our main contracting document. On page two of our Letter Proposal, we say the following,“The location of the Project is ___________________________, referred to below as the “Site.” The word Site has now been defined. Going forward in this contract if you are using the term Site to refer to this same location of the Project, you should use Site, with a capital “S.” If you are talking about any old site, you would leave the word with a lower case “s.” While this sounds ridiculously picky, it is very important. Once you define a term, if you refer to that term again, you must use it in its capitalized form or it

simply will not mean what you want it to mean. Please think about this as you write your contracts. As always, the Legal Department is happy to help.

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