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Italics vs. Quotation Marks
Italicize the titles of novels, books, movies, long
poems, plays, CDs, and TV series, and the names of newspapers, magazines,
and journals.
• The Washington Post reviewer
looked ashen after seeing the world’s worst production of The
Phantom of the Opera.
Put quotation marks around the titles of chapters,
episodes of TV shows, essays, articles, photographs, poems, short
stories, and songs.
• Every Halloween, Ming sings “Monster
Mash” as she decorates her room with orange and black streamers.
Capitalization
There are no firm rules governing capitalization, but
there are some
traditions.
Lowercase short prepositions—as long
as they’re not a crucial part of the title or used as adverbs, adjectives,
or conjunctions.
• Christiane listened to “Stand by Me”
on the way to see Up the Down Staircase.
Lowercase and, as, but, for, or, nor,
and to.
• You may be surprised to learn that
the actual title begins The Life and Strange Surprizing
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner—and the
subtitle goes on from there.
Lowercase a, an,
and the.
• “All on a Golden Afternoon” is my favorite
Disney song, next to “I’m Waiting for the One I Love.”
The rule that trumps all others: always capitalize
the first and last words of titles. This means that if a title ends
in the, for example, or begins in up,
you must capitalize those words.
• Rosie is reading The Thing
That Slimed Me.
• Christian wrote the article called
“Hard to Talk To.”
Newspapers and Magazines
Even if the names of newspapers and magazines officially
begin with the or another article, don’t italicize
or capitalize that article.
• As soon as the New Yorker arrived,
Anna devoured Anthony Lane’s review of
the movie.
Don’t italicize or capitalize words like newspaper or magazine unless they
are actually part of a newspaper or magazine’s title.
• I enjoy the gossipy pages of Us
Weekly magazine.
Singular
Note that titles always take a singular verb, even
if they mention plural items.
• Jumpers isn’t Sarah’s
first choice, but she’ll see it if Bug is sold
out.
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