Have you ever looked at news headlines or song titles and thought it didn’t make sense that some words were capitalised while others weren’t?
Title casing is the name given to the way some headings are formatted. A lazy way to describe it might be to say that it means capitalising every word, whereas in an ordinary sentence it will only be the first word and any proper nouns that start with a capital letter. However, a look at well-known titles like Ken Kesey’s novel ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and the Pink Floyd album ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ show that this definition isn’t quite accurate.
In title casing, not quite every word is capitalised, but not all sources agree on the ones that shouldn’t be. In the above two examples, ‘the’ and ‘of’ are not capitalised, and all sources would concur with that, but their opinions might differ on the word ‘over’. As this title case converter tool shows, The New York Times and AMA Manual of Style say ‘over’ should be capitalised in titles, but the Bluebook (which is referred to for citation in US law) and the MLA Handbook disagree.
The general guidance, given by sites like GrammarCheck.net, is that all nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives should be capitalised in title case, although ‘is’ is an example of a verb and it’s not uncommon to see it left in lower case. The judgment call comes with propositions (like ‘by’, ‘with’ and ‘over’), conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’) and articles (‘the’, ‘a’, ‘an’), where popular conventions are to only capitalise ones over a certain length. Some publishers suggest this length to be five letters or more, while others recommend as few as three letters, which is where inconsistencies like ‘over’ and ‘from’ arise. Applying this rule rigidly can also lead to unusual looking formatting in phrases like ‘even Though’ and ‘in Front of’.
Perhaps because of these points of debate, most major news sources don’t bother with title casing for their headlines, as a look around sites like BBC News, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Sky News, Reuters and Fox News shows. We also prefer to avoid it at Engage Web, unless our clients request otherwise.
With online content, it’s all about establishing style and consistency, which has positive effects on both human readability and search engine optimisation (SEO). Why not speak to us to learn how professionally written and edited blogs and web copy can benefit your site and bring in more business?
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