Premise

When we talk about formatting titles of different works, we mean those works other than your own (i.e. what to do when creating a title for your own paper, assignment, etc.). Those situations have their own conventions. And so here, we want to clarify how and why it’s important to standardize how you format titles of different works that you might talk about within a document that you’re writing (e.g. if you’re writing an essay or a blog review about movies, books, articles, etc.).

It’s likely that you’ve actually seen this convention implemented a million times; in fact, you probably see it every day. And so if you’re wondering why you sometimes see titles of works in quotation marks, e.g. “The President Goes Wild,” vs. in italics, e.g. In the End of Time, you’ve come to the write place!

Examples

Here is the very simple rule to follow: longer works—and or collections of works—are always italicized; contrastingly, shorter works—or works that appear as part of larger collections—are always in quotation marks. Just look at some examples:

• Longer works/Collections (italicize):
  • Novels (a longer work)
  • Feature Films (a longer work)
  • Albums (a collection of works, i.e. individual songs)
  • Literary magazines (a collection of shorter creative pieces, e.g. short stories)
  • Newspapers (collections of individual articles)
• Shorter works/Pieces within collections (quotes):
  • Articles (posts with larger websites/newspapers)
  • Songs (single tracks)
  • Short films (briefer movies)
  • Poems (stand-alone works)

As such, this is why these popular titles are formatted in these following ways:

• Interstellar is definitely an impressive visual experience. (Full length movie)
• I read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. (Short story)
• I could listen to After Hours until my ears bleed. (Album)
• The New Yorker isn’t as groundbreaking as it once was. (Short story collection)
• I really do think that “In the End it Matters,” has the best dialogue in the whole show. (Episode from a TV series)
• Most people consider “Indefatigable Blues” to be his best early work. (Short film)
• I loved James’ piece, “Justice Undone,” in this month’s Politics Daily. (A news article within a newspaper, respectively)

So why does this all matter? Honestly, it’s not a huge deal. But getting title formatting right tells readers if you’re talking about a longer work/collection or shorter ones. It can also help avoid potential confusion, as it indicates to readers shorthand whether a work is a longer/self-contained one vs. a shorter piece. Just consider the following example from an album, which contains a track that happens to bear the same name as the album (which is relatively common). “I love We Are by Jon Batiste.” But is “We Are” referring to the album name or the song name from that album? Just by formatting it tells your reader which you mean.

Further Considerations

• You might be wondering: “What happened from back in grade school, when I was told to bold and underline my own titles, and or titles of works that I talk about in my essay. Was my teacher wrong? Or worse, lying?” No, but this is sort of the more advanced version of that as there’s more than one way to format titles that you discuss within your work as per the explanation above.
• This process can be applied to some citation styles, like MLA. Just look at any MLA Works Cited page, and you’ll often see this formatting appear within an entry. If there’s a title in quotation marks, followed by a title that’s italicized, then you know that the former is something like an article title, contained within a larger work, like a literary journal.
  • E.g. “Rules for Formatting Titles Within Works,” The Big Book of Writing Techniques.
• If you want to practice this premise, just look up any of the genre type examples from above on a webpage like Wikipedia. Wiki is a great example because they also bold their titles too, which is obviously something a little bit different to get your attention—yet they still follow the premise of longer works/shorter works being italicized vs. quoted.