Capital Letters in Titles: Headline Styling
Titles of books, movies, and TV shows are conspicuously full of capital letters, but not every word of a title should be capitalized (no matter what iTunes may think). So how do you know which words get the capital treatment and which are business as usual? There are rules, but they can be wobbly, and even the respected Chicago Manual of Style admits they're arbitrary. Still, most people can agree on a few rules for writing titles, a.k.a. headline style:
1. Capitalize the first and last words.
2. Capitalize everything that isn't
- a coordinate conjunction (and, but, for, or, nor)
- a preposition (to, from, on, out, of, at, with, into, up, across, after, beside, etc.)
Unfortunately, the preposition rule has a lot of exceptions. Some style guides pick a number of letters—say, three—and capitalize any preposition with more:
Truck-Stop Dining From Applesauce to Waffles
Others insist all prepositions should be lower case, though this can look weird with long prepositions like concerning.
Another problem with prepositions is their slipperiness. The same words can also be found playing adjectives, adverbs, and subordinate conjunctions, in which case they do need to be capitalized:
Canoeing up the Volga With Evgeni
But: Why You Should Never Look Up Old Friends on Facebook
But: How to Move On After You've Had a Bad Perm
(If you decided to use the three-letter rule, after would be capitalized whether it was a preposition or not—a good reason to use this rule and keep your life simple.)
3. When a hyphen changes two words into one (called a hyphenated compound), you should capitalize both words. Or you should only capitalize the first. It's your choice—pick a rule! And, of course, be consistent.
If you choose not to capitalize the word after the hyphen, there are a few exceptions you need to know. Obviously, words that would normally be capitalized should keep their capital letters, hyphen or no hyphen:
The Growth of Anti-Peruvianism in Post-Blair Britain
Also, compounds that start with prefixes too feeble to stand on their own as words (such as pre- and anti-) need two capital letters to be taken seriously:
My thesis is called “Anti-Establishmentarianism in Pre-Revolutionary France.”
4. Don't tamper with foreign names. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's little de should stay lower-case no matter where it may find itself.
Trust your instincts. If something looks weird, change it. Some expert, somewhere, will probably agree with you.