Is it okay to ignore putting periods between initials?
My name is Venkatesh MG. M stands for the name of my birth place, which begins with M, and G is an initial derived from my father's name.
Since school, I have been using only these two variations of my names:
- Venkatesh MG (Almost all the time)
- Venkatesh M G (rarely)
But recently, I've been told that the general style rule is to use periods between the initials: Venkatesh M.G.
I am about to publish a children's book. I'd like to use my name without the periods, as I want it that way. I also like the style where there is no periods between the initials.
Is it okay if I continue using Venkatesh MG as my name?
Solution 1:
It's your name. You can express it however you like.
On the periods (or full stops) between initials, though: it seems that they're still common in the US, but have largely been dropped in most of the rest of the English-speaking world.
It also depends on house styles: some US papers, for example, still refer to the B.B.C., which just looks weird to UK eyes.
Oddly, though, I almost never see "U.S.A."
Solution 2:
I think that at least in the US, 'Venkatesh MG' (or '...M.G.') will sound like some rapper type name, like 'LL Cool J' or 'Notorious B.I.G.'. Virtually no one in the US will get that M stands for your birthplace; that just isn't part of naming here. As far as periods, I'd leave them out, but it's not a big deal.
On the other hand, as others have pointed out, it's your name, do what you want.
Solution 3:
Even Louis C.K. uses dots (inconsistently, though - both forms are in text sections of his website and on different album covers), and his stage name's "initials" are a phonetic version of his surname, Székely, rather than an abbreviation of anything that starts with either letter.
Harry S. Truman also is spelled with a dot, and the "S" doesn't stand for anything either - his middle name is literally just "S".
These indicate that there is a strong preference, at least in American English, for using dots for anything that looks like an initial in a personal name, regardless of the convention for other abbreviations like USA or BBC.
But it's your name, you should do what you want with it. There are people who have spelled their name in lowercase, added digits, etc, especially in writing and show business, even without being able to point to a cultural tradition of it being common. This really shouldn't be regarded as a hard-and-fast rule. If your publisher insists on it and can't provide a better reason than "general style rule", you may want to look for a different publisher.
Solution 4:
Having a first name written out in full followed by initials is not a usual pattern in the USA, with or without periods; indeed, it is probably a more unusual pattern than having a name which contains internal capitalization, an unpronounceable combination of consonants, or both. As such, I would expect that if you write your name as "Venkatesh M.G.", then "Venkatesh" will probably be interpreted as your surname; if you write your name as "Venkatesh MG", the MG may be interpreted as a name perhaps pronounced as "umg" or "mug". If you wish to emphasize that MG is to be regarded as a unit, but the letters should be pronounced separately, I would suggest perhaps using a hyphen; "Venkatesh M-G". The hyphen wouldn't exactly be standard, but someone seeing it would probably assume that the M and G represent the names your parents had before they were married (perhaps your parents weren't named M and G, but they may have had names which, when joined as a phrase, would have undesirable connotations). Even though that wouldn't quite describe your situation, it's probably closer than anything that could be achieved with any other form of punctuation.