Q. My company has a handbook called The Standards and Expectations Handbook. We intend to call it “the handbook” for short. When written, should “the Handbook” be capitalized to denote that we’re talking about the specific book, or should it be lowercase?
A. You can do it either way. Here we write “the Manual” when referring to CMOS (italic, because it’s a shortened italic title), but it wouldn’t be wrong to call it “the manual.”