Hey, everyone, welcome to another English grammar lesson. Today we’re going to be
talking about how to properly format titles.
So, when it comes to titles, here are the
rules: For most longer works, you will use italics. However, when you are writing these
titles by hand, you want to underline them. And that’s because it’s pretty awkward
to try to italicize your handwriting. So, once again, if you’re typing a longer title,
italicize it; if you’re hand writing a longer title, underline it. So, what are some examples
of “longer titles”? What do I mean by that, exactly? Well, could be novels, books,
plays, magazine or journal titles, movies, TV shows, albums, works of art, ships—lots
of stuff. Now, when it comes to shorter works, you will want to use quotation marks in both
typing and handwriting. Shorter works would include things like short stories, poems,
articles, songs, TV episodes—stuff like that. And, again, these would be put in quotation
marks regardless of whether you’re typing or handwriting them. Okay, so what about capitalization?
What specific words should be capitalized in a title? Well, the short answer is “the
important ones,” but generally speaking, you do not capitalize articles, which are
“a,” “an,” and “the”; short prepositions, which include words like “at,” “of,”
“on,” “in,” or “by”; as well as coordinating conjunctions, like your FANBOYS:
“for,” “and,” “nor,” “but,” “or,” “yet,” “so.” The only exception
to this rule would be if these words start your title—like, if “the” was the first
word of your title, you would capitalize it. Otherwise, you typically wouldn’t. Okay,
so let’s try a few. How would I properly format the following TV series title: finding
julie? Okay, so I said it was a TV show—like, an actual series—a longer work—so we’ve
got to be thinking about italics here, but since I’m hand writing it, I’m going to
want to underline it. Then, we’d want to think about what important words we need to
capitalize and leave out our smaller prepositions or articles or FANBOYS, which I actually don’t
see in this title, so… here we go. All right, how about this poem title—the title of a
single, individual poem: stay here and listen? Okay, so, for starters, it’s a poem—it’s
a shorter work—so we’ve got to be thinking about quotation marks. Then we look at our
capitalization, and we find the word “and” in there. And we know that that’s a word
that we should typically leave lowercase, so we capitalize the rest, and it looks like
this. Couple more. How about this book title: the sand on the shore of northland? Okay,
so, for starters, this is a book—a longer work—so we’d want to use italics if we
were typing it. However, I’m going to be hand writing it in this situation, so I’m
going to think about underlining. Now, let’s look at our capitalization. Well, we’ve
got a ton of “minor” words here—words that should not be capitalized typically.
So go ahead and take a second, and see if you can point out each of those words. Should
have said… “the,” “on,” “the,” and “of.” Now, the question is how many
of you remembered what we said earlier about minor words that start a title? Because if
the first word of your title is a minor word, you still want to capitalize it. So, all of
the other ones would be lowercase, but because the word “the” starts the title, it needs
to be capitalized. So the whole title, completed and correct, would look like this. Okay, last
one. How would you format the title of this short story: the things we say when no one
else is around? Okay, so, for starters, I said this was a short story—a shorter work—so
we’re going to want to use quotation marks. And now for the capitalization. Well, just
like last time, I have a minor word to start the title, so that minor word is going to
need to be capitalized. But the rest of the minor words don’t. The question is, though,
what are those words? Give yourself a point if you said… “is”—yep, just “is.”
Now, yes, there are some other short words in this title, but they’re not minor words,
so we still need to capitalize them. So, altogether, your revised title looks like this. Cool!
Well, whether you came here for a refresher or are just now learning this stuff for the
first time, I hope this video helped. Be sure to check out the free practice down in the
description, and—uh—we’ll see you next time. Thanks.