Title case

With title case, every important word has an initial capital.

The Cat sat on the Mat

Sentence case

With sentence case, only the first word and proper nouns have initial capitals.

The cat sat on the mat.

When to use title or sentence case

Use title case for the titles of books, reports or Acts.

Seven Habits of Effective People

Titles of books take italics. Acts when mentioned for the first time are also in italics with the date. Subsequent mentions can omit the date and are in plain text.


These days, headings and subheadings within documents are usually in sentence case. This is preferable because:

  • sentence case looks cleaner
  • you don’t have to worry about which words are ‘important’
  • you are more likely to be consistent.

When referring to the titles of articles in text, use plain text, sentence case and single quotation marks .

‘A novel idea: curl up in bed with a virtual book’, Sunday Life