Capitalization: The Major Words In The Titles Of Books, Articles, And Songs

Titles – whether they be of books, songs, TV show, whatever – often present a problem with capitalization. In informal writing, one can merely capitalize the first letter of every word in the title.

Sense And Sensibility is better than Pride And Prejudice.

The Tell-Tale Heart is a disturbing story.

Children like to listen to Puff The Magic Dragon.

The Beatles wrote Strawberry Fields Forever

In formal writing, nouns, verb, adjectives and adverbs are the only words capitalized. Prepositions, articles, and conjunctions aren’t capitalized (unless they’re the first letter of the first word).

Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet.

Note that and isn’t capitalized.

East of Eden was a popular book by John Steinbeck.

The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios is the first short story in the collection.

The first movie of the series is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Two and a Half Men explores the lives of two brothers.

The same rule applies to subtitles.

Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando: A Biography

The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists.

Sometimes the font use on the cover of a book will be all in capitals; you should never write a title in all capitals unless the font you are using has no lower case letters.