Sunday, December 31, 2006

Capitalization in Titles

As I've been writing this blog, I've tried to be grammatically correct. Nothing has given me more headaches than the capitalization rules for the titles of my posts. This morning, I finally looked it up on the web. Here's what I found from The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation.

Rule 8. Capitalize titles of publications except for little words such as a, an, the, but, as, if, and, or, nor, when used internally. If these little words begin the title, capitalize them. Capitalize short verb forms such as Is, Are, and Be.

Examples
  • The Day of the Jackal
  • What Color Is Your Parachute?
  • A Tale of Two Cities
Just thought I'd share.

1 comment:

Justin said...

I was on the school paper in High School... In the newspaper business, there are two schools of thought on caps for headlines, which you use is up to the individual publication.

The first one is that you capitalize the first word and any word after with more than three letters (with obvious exceptions) and the second is that you just Cap the first word and anything that you'd otherwise normally cap.

I primarily did layout and photography, so the headline style we used (the second one) is stuck in my head, so I use that to this day.