Happy March, everyone! Can you believe we’re already a week in? It feels like January and February just disappeared. For those up north, hopefully, this month brings some relief from the bitter cold!
Since it’s the first Thursday of the month, I open my book, Eating an Elephant: Write Your Life One Bite at a Time, to see what stands out.
In episode 125 of the Life Writers Vlog, we talk about capitalization—specifically when to capitalize titles of people, books, and stories.
A common mistake I see when editing is capitalizing a person’s title when it stands alone. For example, district judge should be lowercase unless it precedes a name like District Judge Robert Hebert.
With titles of books and stories, capitalize all verbs, first and last words, and big words.
Need help? Try the free tool Capitalize My Title—just watch out for those pop-up ads!
Tell us about your experience with capitalizing titles of people, books, and stories.
Just remember, if you capitalize titles perfectly or if sometimes you’re not so sure, the only way to do this wrong is to not do it at all!
Until next time, happy writing, everyone!
A lot of food for thought here. I’m with Terry Deer in regard to italicizing a title in the middle of the text.
Yo!!! Capitalize this.
There’s an excellent article about capitalization on the Grammarly website. I don’t have problems with capitalizing correctly, using title case, for story titles when they’re separated from the story. When I use a title in the middle of a text block, I more often use sentence case, in which the first word of the title is capitalized and the rest are lowercase unless one of them is a proper noun. To me, italicizing the title and putting it in sentence case is less jarring than having a lot of capital letters. I don’t know how widespread acceptance for that practice… Read more »
What trips me up are military titles. First Sergeant looks weird not capitalized.