Capitalization can be tricky when you’re typing titles. I’ve been coming across this as I work through my MP3 collection, trying to standardize file names and metadata. Granted, citation styles like MLA and APA have their own rules for capitalizing within a paper and within the Works Cited page, but apart from that, there actually ARE some basic rules for capitalizing within a title. This may come up in your song titles or in a library catalog, to give a couple examples.
Writer’s Block has a webpage for Capitalization in Titles that explains how to capitalize. Here’s a summary:
- Always capitalize the first and last words.
- Capitalize all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinate conjunctions (”as”, “because”, “although”).
- Lowercase all articles, coordinate conjunctions (”and”, “or”, “nor”), and prepositions regardless of length, when they are other than the first or last word.
- Lowercase the “to” in an infinitive.
There you go. To simplify, just DON’T capitalize prepositions, articles, and “and, or, nor” (unless they’re first or last words) and you’ll have it pretty much down.
Na
August 28th, 2008 at 6:46
The hardest thing for me to remember is that all verbs and pronouns are supposed to be capitalized. I find myself wanting to put “is” and “it” in lowercase.