According to most style guides, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are the only words capitalized in titles of books, articles, and songs. Prepositions, articles, and conjunctions aren’t capitalized (unless they’re the first or last word). The example below illustrates this rule:
Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare wrote Romeo And Juliet.
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The and in Romeo and Juliet should not be capitalized because it is a conjunction. The exception to the rule, when it comes to prepositions, is that if the word contains six or more letters, it should be capitalized.
Consider these additional examples of correctly capitalized titles:
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.
The sitcom Two and a Half Men explores the lives of two brothers.
The same rule regarding title capitalization applies to subtitles. See the examples below:
The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists
Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando: A Biography.
In this particular example, the article “a” is capitalized because it is the first word of the subtitle.
