By Mary Morel
Title case
With title case, every ‘important’ word has an initial capital.
The Cat sat on the Mat
Unfortunately, experts disagree about capitalising prepositions (e.g. to, for, between).
The Chicago Manual of Style recommends lower case for all prepositions regardless of length, whereas AP Style recommends capitalising all words of four letters or more. (The Chicago Manual of Style makes an exception for prepositions used adverbially or adjectivally, for example, Talk Up Your Business).
Which do you prefer?
The Light Between Oceans
The Light between Oceans
Style guides also don’t agree about whether to capitalise the second word of a hyphenated compound (‘Self-respect’ or ‘Self-Respect’).
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
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