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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/16512
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

In the context of a technical manual, I need to write instructions guiding users through several standard manipulations. When providing examples of these manipulations, I have written a short sentence containing "before" and "after" examples which appear in (potentially multi-line) vertical blocks of their own. As a result, I am unsure as to whether the middle of the sentence should be capitalized. Additionally, a suggestion was made on ELU SE that removal of colons leading the code blocks may be preferable. I have presented an example of this below as well.

* * *

**With capitalization**

Hence, the following code:

    camera.start_recording('foo.h264', quantization=25)

Should be replaced with:

    camera.start_recording('foo.h264', quality=25)

* * *

**Without capitalization**

Hence, the following code:

    camera.start_recording('foo.h264', quantization=25)

should be replaced with:

    camera.start_recording('foo.h264', quality=25)

* * *

**Without capitalization or colons**

Hence, the following code

    camera.start_recording('foo.h264', quantization=25)

should be replaced with

    camera.start_recording('foo.h264', quality=25)

* * *

My instinct suggests the second or third examples are preferable, but I'd be interested to learn of any style rules addressing this. For that matter, if there is a better way of structuring such examples which avoids these issues altogether, I would be most interested!

[Should I capitalise "or" between examples?](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/199088/should-i-capitalise-or-between-examples) was the most relevant question I could find to this one (and indeed was the corner of SE where I first posed this query, before being made aware of Writers), and I tend to agree with its reasoning that the lowercase version is preferable. Unfortunately the best suggestion in its answer (to use a bullet list of examples) doesn't really lend itself to potentially large blocks of code.

Original score: 2