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MLA Titles | How to Format & Capitalize Source Titles

Published on April 2, 2019 by Courtney Gahan . Revised on March 5, 2024.

In MLA style , source titles appear either in italics or in quotation marks:

• Italicize the title of a self-contained whole (e.g. a book, film, journal, or website).
• Use  quotation marks around the title if it is part of a larger work (e.g. a chapter of a book, an article in a journal, or a page on a website).

All major words in a title are capitalized . The same format is used in the Works Cited list and in the text itself.

When you use the Scribbr MLA Citation Generator , the correct formatting and capitalization are automatically applied to titles.

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Table of contents

Capitalization in mla titles, punctuation in mla titles, titles within titles, exceptions to mla title formatting, sources with no title, abbreviating titles, titles in foreign languages, frequently asked questions about mla titles.

In all titles and subtitles, capitalize the first and last words, as well as any other principal words.

What to capitalize

What not to capitalize

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Use the same punctuation as appears in the source title. However, if there is a subtitle, separate it from the main title with a colon and a space, even if different (or no) punctuation is used in the source.

Example of a work with a subtitle

The exception is when the title ends in a question mark, exclamation point or dash, in which case you keep the original punctuation:

Sometimes a title contains another title—for example, the title of an article about a novel might contain that novel’s title.

For titles within titles, in general, maintain the same formatting as you would if the title stood on its own.

Titles and names that fall into the following categories are not italicized or enclosed in quotation marks:

• Scripture (e.g. the Bible, the Koran, the Gospel)
• Laws, acts and related documents (e.g. the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution , the Paris Agreement)
• Musical compositions identified by form, number and key (e.g. Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 in C minor, op. 67)
• Conferences, seminars, workshops and courses (e.g. MLA Annual Convention)

Sections of a work

Words that indicate a particular section of a work are not italicized or placed within quotation marks. They are also not capitalized when mentioned in the text.

Examples of such sections include:

• introduction
• list of works cited
• bibliography

Introductions, prefaces, forewords and afterwords

Descriptive terms such as “introduction”, “preface”, “foreword” and “afterword” are capitalized if mentioned in an MLA in-text citation or in the Works Cited list, but not when mentioned in the text itself.

Example of descriptive term capitalization

In-text citation: (Brontë, Preface )

In text: In her preface to the work, added in a later edition, Brontë debates the morality of creating characters such as those featured in Wuthering Heights .

If there is a unique title for the introduction, preface, foreword or afterword, include that title in quotation marks instead of the generic section name when referencing the source in the Works Cited list or an in-text citation.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

For sources with no title, a brief description of the source acts as the title.

Example of a source reference with no title

Follow these rules for capitalization:

• Capitalize the first word
• Capitalize proper nouns
• Ignore other MLA rules for capitalization

There are some exceptions to this general format: descriptions including titles of other works, such as comments on articles or reviews of movies; untitled short messages, like tweets; email messages; and untitled poems.

Exceptions to general format for sources with no title

If you need to mention the name of a work in the text itself, state the full title, but omit the subtitle.

If you need to refer to the work multiple times, you may shorten the title to something familiar or obvious to the reader. For example, Huckleberry Finn for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . If in doubt, prefer the noun phrase.

If the standalone abbreviation may not be clear, you can introduce it in parentheses, following the standard guidelines for abbreviations. For example, The Merchant of Venice ( MV ) . For Shakespeare and the Bible , there are well-established abbreviations you can use.

When you abbreviate a title, make sure you keep the formatting consistent. Even if the abbreviation consists only of letters, as in the MV example, it must be italicized or placed within quotation marks in the same way as it would be when written in full.

Abbreviating very long titles in the Works Cited list

Titles should normally be given in full in the Works Cited list, but if any of your sources has a particularly long title (often the case with older works), you can use an ellipsis to shorten it here. This is only necessary with extremely long titles such as the example below.

In the Works Cited list, if you are listing a work with a title in a language other than English, you can add the translated title in square brackets.

Example of a reference with a translated title

If you are using the foreign-language title in the text itself, you can also include the translation in parenthesis. For example, O Alquimista ( The Alchemist ) .

You don’t need to include a translation in your reference list or in the text if you expect your readers to be familiar with the original language. For example, you wouldn’t translate the title of a  French novel you were writing about in the context of a French degree.

Non-Latin script languages

For works in a language that does not use the Latin alphabet, such as Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, or Russian, be consistent with how you mention the source titles and also quotations from within them.

For example, if you choose to write a Russian title in the Cyrillic form, do that throughout the document. If you choose to use the Romanized form, stick with that. Do not alternate between the two.

Yes. MLA style uses title case, which means that all principal words (nouns, pronouns , verbs, adjectives , adverbs , and some conjunctions ) are capitalized.

This applies to titles of sources as well as the title of, and subheadings in, your paper. Use MLA capitalization style even when the original source title uses different capitalization .

In MLA style , book titles appear in italics, with all major words capitalized. If there is a subtitle, separate it from the main title with a colon and a space (even if no colon appears in the source). For example:

The format is the same in the Works Cited list and in the text itself. However, when you mention the book title in the text, you don’t have to include the subtitle.

The title of a part of a book—such as a chapter, or a short story or poem in a collection—is not italicized, but instead placed in quotation marks.

When a book’s chapters are written by different authors, you should cite the specific chapter you are referring to.

When all the chapters are written by the same author (or group of authors), you should usually cite the entire book, but some styles include exceptions to this.

• In APA Style , single-author books should always be cited as a whole, even if you only quote or paraphrase from one chapter.
• In MLA Style , if a single-author book is a collection of stand-alone works (e.g. short stories ), you should cite the individual work.
• In Chicago Style , you may choose to cite a single chapter of a single-author book if you feel it is more appropriate than citing the whole book.

The title of an article is not italicized in MLA style , but placed in quotation marks. This applies to articles from journals , newspapers , websites , or any other publication. Use italics for the title of the source where the article was published. For example:

Use the same formatting in the Works Cited entry and when referring to the article in the text itself.

The MLA Handbook is currently in its 9th edition , published in 2021.

This quick guide to MLA style  explains the latest guidelines for citing sources and formatting papers according to MLA.

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The general rule is to use italics on book titles, album titles and publication names for a web document or when you are using a word processing tool. If it is something handwritten you should underline it instead of using italics.

Longer works are italicized while shorter works like song titles or an article from a magazine are put in quotes and are not italicized.

Here are some italics examples:

Costco Plans to Sell Books Only From September to December

Karlie Kloss to Relaunch Life Magazine at Bedford Media

NBF Expands National Book Awards Eligibility Criteria

Striking Writers and Actors March Together on Hollywood Streets

Vice Media Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Titles: when to italicize, underline, or use quotation marks.

Titles are everywhere; we need them in order to be able to refer to any of the countless stories, pictures, blogs, movies, books, songs, and other works of art being created every single day.   Since most writing is about things you’ve experienced- things you’ve read, seen, heard, or touched – chances are very high that you will be including a title of something one day in your writing.

Before that happens, though, you need to know the rules that govern how to correctly write titles.  And when I say “titles,” I’m not referring to forms of addressing people.  Although I’m sure there are specific rules of etiquette that govern when to call someone “Miss” or “Ms.,” the rules I will be describing in this post apply to works of art, like books and music.

When it comes to titles, you can either italicize them or put them in quotation marks.  The 7th edition of the MLA Handbook eliminates underlining (underlining is still acceptable when hand-writing papers). Skip to the end of this post to see a note about underlining titles .  Keeping the rules for italicizing and using quotation marks straight isn’t easy, which is why there are different techniques that make remembering when to do what easier.

Big Things and Little Things

One way of looking at titles is to determine if it belongs to something that is big or something that is little.  A big thing is something that contains little things .  For example, a CD album contains many songs.  A book contains many chapters.  An anthology contains many essays or stories.  A web site contains many web pages.  A TV series contains many episodes. You get the point. 

Once you’ve determined if the title you’re trying to punctuate belongs to a big thing or a little thing, you can punctuate it.  The titles of big things are always italicized, while the titles of little things are placed within quotation marks.  The following are some examples of properly punctuated titles:

• Words Fail Me is a book with a chapter “Are Your Eggs Ready to Hatch?”
• The first episode of first season of the British television series Black Books is called “Cooking the Books.”
• “Head Over Feet” is a song on Alanis Morissette’s third studio album Jagged Little Pill.

As nice as the “big things/little things” trick is for remembering how to punctuate titles, it stops working when it encounters more complex collections of art.  For example, how do you punctuate the titles of the plays you bought in a book called The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare ? Are they considered chapters? They are little things inside of a bigger book, after all.  What about Beowulf?  It’s a poem, which is a little thing, but the MLA Handbook says that poems which are “long” need to be italicized.  What exactly does “long” mean and how are you going to remember to include those poems in with big things?

Don’t toss the towel in yet on this whole punctuating titles business – I’ve come up with a different way to remember whether or not to italicize or put a title in quotation marks.

Can You Buy It?

If you can go out and physically buy a copy of whatever title it is you’re trying to punctuate, italicize it.  If you can’t, put it in quotation marks. 

Since you can go to Barnes and Noble and find Beowulf on the shelves, it gets italicized.  The same can be said about each one of Shakespeare’s plays; you can find them in one large collected works book OR you can find them sold individually.  What you can’t do is drop by Blockbuster and try to rent ONLY the one episode of Lost you missed .  You have to rent the DVD that has several episodes on it, one of which being the episode you missed.  Therefore, you put episode titles of television series in quotation marks. 

This idea even works for web sites and web pages.  When you buy a domain, you’re buying only up to the first .com or .org or .info (or whatever extension you chose).  So only that much of a web site gets italicized (For example, GuildWars.com or Writing Simplified ). Anything after the first extension is a sub page on the web site, and gets placed inside of quotation marks (For example, the “About Me” section of my blog or any one of the titles of my individual blog posts). 

Even this trick for remembering how to punctuate titles breaks down, though.  You can buy singles of songs and there are entire works of fiction put online for free all the time.  Taken in conjunction with the “big things/little things” technique, the “Can you buy it?” trick should help you get through punctuating at least 98% of every title you’ll encounter successfully. 

For the other 2% of titles you encounter and don’t know what to do with, well, that’s what I’m here for.  Use your professor! Don’t feel embarrassed about asking when you’re unsure about how to do something.  Chances are, your teacher won’t know the answer off the top of his/her head either and will learn something in the process of looking it up for you. 

Names of Forms, Games, Restaurants, Etc.

Style guides like those published by the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Psychological Association (APA) are great sources to turn to when you need to know how to punctuate something properly for a paper. But if you’re not writing an academic paper or your writing includes topics that aren’t typically found in professional publications, they won’t provide you with the answers you need. For those issues, you have to rely on your own judgment in applying the rules because an official standard hasn’t been set.

• Names of Forms : It’s rare for someone to cite a blank document (i.e., an unfilled-out form) so examples of this in published peer-reviewed literature are scarce. However, webpages and print documents refer to form titles when indicating that such and such a form needs to be filled out, or explaining the purpose of certain forms. Every single instance that I've seen so far simply capitalizes the first letter of each word in the form title. For example: "Fill out the Motor Vehicle Records Form to request information about a particular vehicle involved in an accident," "If you are employed in the US, you must fill out a W-4 Form," and "Make sure to fill out all shaded areas in Form I-765." Also notice that the word “Form” is in every name.
• Names of Restaurants: I still remember when it was natural to go to a bookstore to pick up a restaurant guide.  Nowadays, you turn to the Internet for restaurant reviews and suggestions, so finding a print standard for how to punctuate the title is difficult.  As far as the online standard goes, you have the choice to either 1) capitalize the first letter of each word in the restaurant’s name or 2) italicize (or underline!) the restaurant’s name.  You would never put the name in quotation marks, though. As the restaurant is the “big” thing that includes “smaller” things like menu choices, you would put the names of dishes in quotation marks, unless it’s a general food item that’s well known. For example, “Have you been to Chili’s ? I love their chicken parmesan,” or “I’ll see you at Hula Hut. Don’t forget to order me the ‘Funky Dunky Onion Strings’.” Both examples show acceptable ways to punctuate.
• Names of Games: Since the games themselves are the "big" thing that include smaller components, I would italicize their titles.  For example, Magic: the Gathering is a card game similar in playing style to Pokemon Trading Card Game .  I did run a quick search through a research database to see how peer-reviewed journal articles treat game titles as games are a popular topic of education-related journals. The articles I found only capitalized the first letter of each word in the game's name without italicizing or underlining it.  However, no article ever placed the game's name inside quotation marks.  With that evidence, I'd say it's a matter of personal preference whether to italicize the name or leave it unembellished.  I personally prefer the italics since it's what the rule would call for.
• Etc.: Use your personal judgment in applying the rules or drop me a line (in a comment or an e-mail). I’ll update this list with more troublesome title issues as I’m made aware of them.

A Note About Underlining Titles

Before the advent of computers and word-processing programs, there were only two options available to you when punctuating a title: underlining or quotation marks. When computers starting to become more commonplace, a third option - italicization - was added as an alternative to underlining.

Underlining titles was viewed as necessary only when handwriting titles because it is difficult to italicize one's own handwriting - especially if you're writing in cursive. Many style manuals now omit underlining as an option, stating that computers are accessible to the majority of people living in today's society and underlining is no longer needed.

However, there ARE a couple of situations that still exist where italics is either not supported or redundant:

• Social Media : Some social applications online (e.g., Facebook) do not support embedded HTML code, which means when adding comments you do not have the option of italicizing your font.
• Italicized Fonts : If you enjoy using fonts other than the default Times New Roman or Calibri, you may run across lovely fonts that mimic cursive handwriting. Although it is possible to italicize those fonts even more, the difference between regular and italicized versions of the font is often imperceptible and could confuse your reader.

When you find yourself in a situation where italicizing your font is simply not an option, surround the words you want underlined with underline dashes (Shift + the dash key).  For example, I am reworking my father’s book _Dan, A Man Without Youth_ while concurrently working on my own book, tentatively titled _Online Tools for Writers_.

Good luck with your writing endeavors! If you have any questions about how to go about punctuating titles or getting around the character limitations of online programs, send them my way and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Photo credit: Lutrus

21 comments:

Thank you!! I'm working on a book and the titles of CDs, movies, books, TV shows etc were giving me fits. I saw quite a few things online but your explanation is by far the most lucid (and fun to read). Great stuff!

Aww! Thanks for the kind words, Jackie! I'm glad my post helped someone :).

Thanks for the info...we started a few blogs recently and this was helpful. I am the editor (but using that term very loosely!)

What do you do about book titles that you can buy, but can't italicize- as on Facebook posts? What do you do then? Quotation marks?

Hi Anonymous! Sorry it took a while to publish your comment; Blogger wasn't cooperating these past few days. To answer your question, you would surround the title with underline dashes (press Shift + the dash key). For example, I like to watch the tv show _The Office_ and I just finished ordering the book _The Antithesis_ on Amazon.com. The reason you would use underline dashes instead of quotation marks is when italicizing titles is not an option, you revert back to the rules of our pre-word processor days. The option to italicize only became available when computers became a writing tool. Before the advent of computers, the only way a person could italicize his handwriting was to switch to cursive - but that was only an option if he were not already writing in cursive. When handwriting, the rule is to underline titles that require italicization. Most style guides mention the rule in passing, although the more common computers become, the fewer books bother to call attention to the option to underline. I can understand why as it might confuse students to know that they had THREE options when punctuating titles: underline, italicize, or enclose in quotation marks. It's even more confusing when you try and tell students that TWO of those options denote the same idea. I hope this helps!

As a teacher who needs to explain these rules often, I'm delighted by the simple clarity of the "big things"/"little things" explanation. I'm envious! Why didn't I think of this? Thanks so much!

What about the title of a form? Would you put quotes around it?

Unfortunately, forms are not addressed in any of the style guides as it's very rare for a person to what to cite something that is blank (i.e., not filled out with information) so I don't have an "official" position to refer you to when it comes to writing their titles. what I _can_ tell you is that I've been looking at how webpages and print documents refer to form titles when indicating that such and such a form needs to be filled out, or explaining the purpose of certain forms and every single instance that I've seen so far simply capitalizes the first letter of each word in the form title. For example: "Fill out the Motor Vehicle Records Form to request information about a particular vehicle involved in an accident," "If you are employed in the US, you must fill out a W-4 Form," and "Make sure to fill out all shaded areas in Form I-765." Also, I noticed that almost every form had the word "Form" somewhere in its name. Hope this helps you!

When citing a historical document, you would italicize, correct?

Hey Anonymous! You're right; you would italicize famous stand-alone historical documents (e.g., _The Articles of Confederation_, _US Constitution_, _Emancipation Proclamation_, etc. - individual articles and amendments get placed inside quotation marks) when you reference them in your text. As of the newest MLA edition, you no longer have to include well known historical documents in your list of Works Cited.

This is a wonderful site.  But here's one I don't know what to do with:  Games.  How do I refer to the game Magic that my son and his friends play?  Italicize it or put it in quotes?  I suppose the same question would arise about Monopoly and Clue and many others.  

 Hi Gary! That's a great question. Since the games themselves are the "big" thing that include smaller components, I would italicize their titles.  For example, _Magic: the Gathering_ is a card game similar in playing style to _Pokemon Trading Card Game_.  I did run a quick search through a research database to see how peer-reviewed journal articles treat game titles and the articles I found only capitalized the first letter of each word in the game's name without italicizing or underlining it.  However, no article ever placed the game's name inside quotation marks.  With that evidence, I'd say it's a matter of personal preference whether to italicize the name or leave it unembellished.  I personally prefer the italics since it's what the "rule" would call for. If you were to write about individual cards in the game, I would definitely place them in quotation marks. For example: If your opponent is drawing mana from many forest cards, I would deploy "Acid Rain" to destroy them.

Would you italicize Second Life, which is proprietary, free, open source software where people can interact with one another as avatars?

 Hi, journaleditor! Yes, I would absolutely italicize _Second Life_ as it's the official title of the entire world/gaming platform.  Don't be surprised if you see the name written as is without any extra punctuation or font effects, though, as few people conform to the rule when writing about things online.

You should do something about your double spaces after each sentence.  http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html

 Hey Curt! Actually, double-spacing after periods is a convention carried over from pre-computer times when typesetters manually set and inked type for printing purposes. With the advent of proportional font faces and word-processors, double-spacing the beginning of sentences has become a matter of personal taste, not necessity. 

Is a section of a magazine titled or used in italics?

 Hi, Miriam! I would say a section of a magazine would be written inside quotation marks while the magazine title itself would be italicized. For example: I saw a great recipe I have to make for Thanksgiving in the "Food Finds" section of _Greater Living_.

i can make better websites than this trash

I'm writing a piece of fiction. Is this written correctly? John ran his finger across the names of four kings: ' The King of Great Armies,' ' The King of the Castle,' and ' The King of Nobles.' Sorry about spacing, but I'm typing this on phone. Anyway, the above are fictional Titles within a list within a piece of fiction.

Great article! Thank you. What about the name of a musical group or a popular festival/event?

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Titles in Essays (Italics or Quote Marks?)

• 4-minute read
• 26th February 2018

Formatting your own essay title is easy (just bung a Heading style on it). Unfortunately, the rules about formatting the titles of existing published works (e.g. a textbook or an article from a journal) are more complicated. Usually, though, it comes down to one question: italics or quote marks?

But most students will need to name a book, journal or website in an essay at some point, so it’s important to know how this works. To help you out, we’ve prepared this guide on when to use italics and when to use quote marks for titles.

When to Use Italics

Titles of longer works are usually italicised. A ‘longer work’ in this case is something presented as a standalone publication. Charles Dickens’ famous novel, for example, would be written as Great Expectations if it were named in an essay.

Other examples of longer works that should be italicised include:

• Books and book-length poems (e.g. ‘An analysis of The Wasteland shows…’)
• Journals, newspapers and magazines (e.g. ‘According to The Guardian …’)
• Websites and blogs (e.g. ‘The project was funded via Unbound …’)
• Films (e.g. ‘ Jaws broke several box-office records…’)
• TV series (e.g. ‘Many fans of The X-Files claim…’)
• Plays and other stage shows (e.g. ‘This production of Swan Lake is…’)
• Paintings and works of art (e.g. ‘The Mona Lisa is currently housed…’)
• Music albums (e.g. ‘The album Sticky Fingers was released in…’)

The key factor is that all of these are standalone products, not part of a greater whole. The main exceptions to this rule are holy texts, such as the Bible, which are not typically italicised.

Italics are also used for the names of particular vehicles in some cases, especially ships and spacecraft. For example, we might write about the space shuttle Enterprise or the HMS Beagle (note that the ‘HMS’ is not italicised, since this is an abbreviation).

When to Use Quote Marks

Quote marks , meanwhile, are usually saved for shorter works. These are often part of a larger publication, such as an article in a newspaper or a chapter in an edited book. For example, if we were to name a book and a chapter in one place we’d write:

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Hugh Wilder’s ‘Interpretive Cognitive Ethology’ was first published in Readings in Animal Cognition , edited by Marc Bekoff and Dale Jamieson.

As indicated by the italics, the book here is called Readings in Animal Cognition . ‘Interpretive Cognitive Ethology’, meanwhile, is an essay from the book, so we use quote marks for this title.

Cases where quotation marks are used for titles include:

• Chapters from books
• Articles in newspapers, magazines and journals
• Particular pages or articles from a website
• Individual poems and short stories
• Episodes from a TV show

It is also common to use quote marks for unpublished writing regardless of length. For example, if you were referring to an unfinished manuscript or a PhD dissertation, you would put the title in quote marks; but if these same documents were published, you would use italics.

Look Out for Exceptions!

The guidelines above will apply in most cases, but there are exceptions. The APA style guide, for example, recommends italicising book titles in the main text of an essay, but not in the reference list. As such, it is wise to check your style guide to see if it has specific advice on formatting titles.

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Formatting Titles in Essays

• 2-minute read
• 8th May 2018

Handling your own headings is one thing, but how should you write the titles of other works? You need to mark them out somehow, and you have two standard options: italics or quote marks.

This is especially important in academic writing , as you’ll often have to discuss books and papers written by other people. Here, then, are some guidelines you should follow when formatting titles.

When to Use Italics

You can often spot a title from the capitalisation , but we still format titles to distinguish between different types of source. Titles of longer sources, for example, typically use italics:

Here, Kerrang! is italicised because it is the title of a magazine (i.e. a standalone work that is not one part of a larger whole). Other publications and productions that this applies to include:

• Academic journals
• Newspapers and magazines
• Websites and blogs
• Films and TV shows
• Radio programmes
• Plays and other stage shows
• Book-length poems
• Paintings and other works of art
• Music albums

The key here, then, is that italics are used for longer published works .

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When to Use Quote Marks

We use quote marks for the title of anything that doesn’t fit in the list above. Usually, this will be something that is part of a more substantial publication, such as an article from a magazine:

In this case, we see both the magazine title and an article title. Using italics on the former and quote marks on the latter makes it immediately obvious which is which. Other cases where quote marks are required include:

• Chapters from books
• Academic papers and journal articles
• Articles from newspapers and magazines
• Single pages from a website or posts from a blog
• Individual poems and short stories
• Single episodes of a TV series
• Single poems from a collection
• Songs and other short recordings

In this case, the key is that quote marks are used for shorter works . However, quote marks are also used for unpublished works regardless of length (e.g. a draft manuscript or a PhD dissertation).

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How to Use Italics in Academic Writing: A Guide with Examples

Italics are a common formatting tool used in academic writing to emphasize or highlight certain words or phrases. Proper use of italics can help to clarify the meaning of a sentence or emphasize important information, while improper use can be distracting or confusing to the reader. In this guide, we will discuss the rules of using italics in academic writing, along with examples to help you use them correctly.

• Emphasizing Words or Phrases

Italics are often used to emphasize words or phrases in a sentence. For example:

• The results of the study indicated a significant difference between the control group and the treatment group.
• When she made her argument, she was  adamant  about what she needed to do.

In these examples, the words or phrases that are being emphasized are italicized. This draws the reader’s attention to these specific words or phrases, which can help to clarify the meaning of the sentence.

• Titles of Works

Italics are commonly used to indicate the titles of works in academic writing, such as books, tv shows, movies, video games, and journals. For example:

• In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , Kuhn argued that scientific progress is not linear.
• The movie The Limits of Reason  explores the role of emotions in decision making.
• My brother loves to play  Call of Duty  all day long.

In these examples, the titles of the book and the article are italicized to distinguish them from the rest of the sentence. This helps the reader to identify the specific work being discussed.

• Foreign Words and Phrases

Italics are often used to indicate foreign words and phrases in academic writing. For example:

• The term zeitgeist  is often used in discussions of cultural trends.
• In her paper, Lee explores the concept of face  in Chinese culture.

In these examples, the foreign words or phrases are italicized to indicate that they are not part of the writer’s native language. This helps to avoid confusion and ensure that the reader understands the meaning of the term.

• Scientific Names

Italics are also commonly used to indicate scientific names in academic writing. For example:

• The genus Felis includes all species of cats, such as the domestic cat ( Felis catus ) and the lion ( Felis leo ).
• The bacterium Escherichia coli is commonly found in the human intestine.

In these examples, the scientific names are italicized to distinguish them from the common names of the animals or bacteria. This helps to ensure that the reader understands the specific species being discussed.

Formatting Considerations

When using italics in academic writing, it is important to consider the overall formatting of the document. Italics should be used sparingly and consistently throughout the document. In addition, italics should be used in conjunction with other formatting tools, such as bold and underlining, to ensure clarity and emphasis.

Italics are a useful tool for emphasizing words or phrases, indicating titles of works, identifying foreign words or phrases, and distinguishing scientific names in academic writing. Proper use of italics can help to clarify the meaning of a sentence and enhance the reader’s understanding of the text. By following these guidelines and using examples, you can use italics effectively and confidently in your academic writing.

Jenny Mark is a graduate of California State University of San Bernardino and lives in Southern California. She is a part time professor for Baker College, Southern New Hampshire University, Vista College, and Baker College. She teachs composition, creative writing, and essential college skills. Check out her blog at http://jennysuemark.com

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What Titles Get Italicized When Writing? The Full Guide

My name is Debbie, and I am passionate about developing a love for the written word and planting a seed that will grow into a powerful voice that can inspire many.

The Basics: Understanding Italics in Writing

When to use italics for titles: a common dilemma, full-length works, shorter works, formatting guidelines: style manuals to the rescue.

• for subheadings, and for further subdivisions help you achieve this effortlessly. 3. Emphasize important details: Utilize the power of bold to emphasize key terms or phrases. This will catch your reader’s attention and help them focus on crucial information within your text. 4. Bullet points for clarity: When presenting a series of related points or items, opt for bulleted lists. This format increases visual appeal, aids in comprehension, and encourages a quick scanability of information. 5. Citations made easy: To avoid plagiarism and give proper credit to your sources, consult the appropriate citation style recommended by your style manual. Whether it’s APA, MLA, or Chicago, adhere to the rules and guidelines to ensure accurate and consistent citation within your work. Remember, by adhering to the guidelines provided by style manuals, you can tackle formatting roadblocks with ease, creating professional and polished documents that will impress readers and elevate your written work to new heights. So dive into the valuable world of style manuals and make your formatting fears a thing of the past! Book Titles: Proper Italics Usage

Movies, TV Shows, and Plays: Navigating Titles in Italics

What about articles, essays, and short stories, brand names and product titles: to italicize or not, exceptions to the rule: handy tips for tricky cases, frequently asked questions, in retrospect.

Italics play a crucial role in enhancing the visual presentation and clarity of written content. When used correctly, they can provide emphasis, indicate foreign words or phrases, and differentiate titles of works. Here’s a breakdown of how to effectively utilize italics in your writing:

1. Emphasis: Italics are commonly used to emphasize specific words or phrases, adding weight and significance to them. By setting them apart from the surrounding text, italics draw readers’ attention and create emphasis, making those words stand out. For example, instead of saying, “I really love that song,” you can say, “I really love that song.” The emphasis on “love” conveys a stronger sentiment.

2. Foreign Words or Phrases: When incorporating foreign terms into your writing, italics are used to indicate that these words or phrases are not in the language of the main text. This helps the reader understand that the word is being used from another language and may not have a direct translation. For instance, if you were describing a French dish in an English article, you might write, “The hors d’oeuvres were absolutely delicious.” By italicizing “hors d’oeuvres,” you indicate that it is a non-English term.

Types of Titles

There are numerous types of titles that can appear in writing, including book titles, movie titles, poem titles, article titles, and more. When it comes to deciding whether to use italics for these titles, it can often be a common dilemma. However, understanding the guidelines can help you make the right choice.

When it comes to full-length works such as books, movies, or plays, it is generally recommended to italicize the title. This helps to differentiate the complete work from other elements within the text. Additionally, if you are writing within a formal setting, such as in academic papers or articles, following this guideline is crucial for maintaining consistency and adhering to standard writing conventions.

On the other hand, shorter works like articles, chapters, or poems are typically placed in quotation marks instead of being italicized. Using quotation marks helps to indicate that the title is part of a larger work. This is especially important when referencing shorter pieces within a longer body of text or when citing sources. For example, when writing an essay, you would italicize the book containing multiple chapters, but put the individual chapter title or article title in quotation marks.

Understanding when to use italics versus quotation marks for titles is important in order to accurately convey the intended meaning and provide clarity to your readers. By following these guidelines, you can navigate the common dilemma of whether to use italics for titles and ensure your writing maintains a polished and professional appearance.

For those who find themselves swimming in a sea of confusion when it comes to formatting, fear not! Style manuals are here to rescue you from the abyss of uncertainty. These invaluable resources provide a comprehensive set of guidelines, facilitating consistency and clarity in your written work. To ensure your documents are well-structured and professional, follow these essential formatting tips:

1. Consistency is key: Remember to use consistent formatting throughout your document. Whether it’s punctuations, headings, or citation styles, maintaining uniformity enhances readability and conveys a sense of professionalism.

2. Headings hierarchy: Arrange your headings hierarchically to create a logical flow within your document. HTML tags like

In the world of literature, italics play a crucial role in emphasizing book titles and creating a visually appealing format. Knowing when to properly use italics can make a significant difference in the professionalism and readability of your work. Here are some helpful guidelines to ensure the correct usage of italics for book titles:

1. **Complete Works**: When referencing a complete book, such as a novel, memoir, or collection of poems, it is important to italicize the title. For example, if you are discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, *The Great Gatsby*, remember to italicize the title to distinguish it from the rest of the text.

2. **Partial Works**: On the other hand, when referring to a specific chapter, short story, or essay within a larger collection or anthology, use double quotation marks instead of italics. For instance, if you are analyzing Toni Morrison’s novel, *Beloved*, and want to highlight a specific chapter, like “Rememory,” enclose the chapter title in quotation marks to indicate it is a smaller work within the larger context.

When it comes to distinguishing titles of movies, TV shows, and plays, the use of italics is crucial. Italicizing these titles is a common practice in writing, as it helps to differentiate them from the surrounding text and emphasizes their importance. By following this simple formatting rule, you can ensure that your readers easily recognize the titles and understand the references you make.

To properly navigate titles in italics, remember the following guidelines:

1. Movies: Titles of full-length movies should always be italicized. For example, “The Shawshank Redemption” is an iconic film that captivates audiences with its powerful storytelling. 2. TV Shows: When referring to a TV show, it is important to italicize the title. For instance, “Friends” remains a beloved sitcom that continues to entertain viewers of all ages.

Articles, essays, and short stories are three distinct forms of written expression that offer unique opportunities for writers to convey their thoughts, ideas, and stories to their intended audience.

An article is a piece of writing that focuses on presenting factual information, analysis, or opinion on a particular topic. Whether it’s a news article, a feature article, or an informative blog post, articles aim to provide readers with valuable insights and knowledge. They typically follow a structured format that includes an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Articles may also include subheadings, bullet points, and images to enhance readability.

On the other hand, an essay is a more formal and thoughtful piece of writing that explores a specific topic in depth. Essays often present the author’s personal perspective or argument supported by evidence and logical reasoning. They may provide a critical analysis, compare and contrast different viewpoints, or present a persuasive argument. Typically, essays are structured into an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. They follow a distinct thesis statement, which acts as the central idea guiding the reader through the essay.

Short stories are fictional narratives that focus on a brief incident, a character, or an event. Unlike articles and essays, short stories are a form of creative writing that allows authors to immerse readers in a fictional world of characters and plotlines. These concise narratives can range from thought-provoking to entertaining, often leaving readers with a lasting impact or message. Short stories don’t require extensive background information and are usually composed with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end, highlighting the significance of storytelling skills within a limited space.

When it comes to using brand names and product titles in your writing, one important aspect to consider is whether to italicize them or not. The use of italics can help distinguish these names and titles from the rest of the text, but it is not always necessary or prescribed. Here are a few factors to consider when deciding whether to use italics for brand names and product titles:

1. Consistency: Maintaining consistency throughout your content is crucial for a professional and polished look. If you decide to italicize brand names and product titles, make sure to do so consistently throughout your writing.

2. Brand guidelines: Some brands have specific guidelines for how their names should be presented in writing. It is worth checking the brand’s style guide or website to see if they prefer their name to be italicized or represented in a specific way.

On the other hand, there are situations when italics may not be necessary or preferred:

1. Widely recognized brands: Brands that are well-known and easily identifiable may not require italics. Consider the popularity and recognition of the brand before deciding to italicize it.

2. Clarity and readability: Using italics excessively can be visually distracting and negatively impact the readability of your text. If your content contains multiple brand names or product titles, consider using bold formatting instead of italics to avoid overwhelming the reader.

In the world of rules and norms, there are always exceptions that leave us scratching our heads. When it comes to tricky cases, it’s important to be prepared and armed with knowledge. Here are some handy tips to help you navigate those exception-filled waters:

• Think Outside the Box: Tricky cases often require creative solutions. Break free from the conventional and explore alternative approaches . Embracing flexibility will enable you to find unexpected answers.
• Consult the Experts: When facing an exceptional scenario, seeking advice from specialists can be a game-changer. Whether it’s a legal matter or a complex technical problem, tapping into the expertise of those who specialize in the field can provide invaluable insights and guidance.
• Double-Check the Details: Tricky cases are notorious for their subtle nuances. In these situations, paying attention to the smallest details can make all the difference. Take your time to thoroughly analyze the case, ensuring that no stone is left unturned.

Don’t let tricky cases discourage you. Remember, exceptions exist to challenge us and push the boundaries of our understanding. By thinking creatively, seeking advice, and paying attention to the details, you’ll be better equipped to tackle even the trickiest of cases!

Q: When should I use italics when writing? A: Italics are used to emphasize or highlight specific words, phrases, or titles in written text.

Q: What is the purpose of italicizing titles? A: Italicizing titles helps to distinguish them from regular text and brings attention to their importance or significance.

Q: Which titles are typically italicized in writing? A: Titles of longer works such as books, magazines, newspapers, films, plays, TV shows, music albums, paintings, and sculptures are generally italicized.

Q: Are there any exceptions to italicizing book titles? A: Yes, shorter works like chapters or sections of books, poems, short stories, articles, and essays are usually enclosed in quotation marks, not italicized.

Q: How about italicizing titles of websites, blogs, or web pages? A: In general, website and blog names are not italicized. However, if you are referring to a specific page or article within a website, that title should be italicized.

Q: What about titles of songs or individual music tracks? A: Song titles, along with individual tracks from albums, are typically enclosed in quotation marks, rather than being italicized.

Q: Should I italicize the names of video games? A: Yes, names of video games are typically italicized. It helps differentiate the title from the surrounding text.

Q: Do I need to italicize scientific or research papers? A: Italicization of scientific or research papers is not necessary. However, if you are referring to a specific paper or article within a larger publication, then that title should be italicized.

Q: Is it necessary to italicize foreign words or phrases? A: Italicizing foreign words or phrases helps to distinguish them from the rest of the text. This convention allows readers to recognize that the word or phrase is in a different language.

Q: Are headlines or titles of newspaper articles italicized? A: No, newspaper article titles or headlines are usually not italicized. They are generally written in bold or enclosed in quotation marks.

Q: What is the key takeaway regarding italics in writing titles? A: Remember, italics are used to set certain titles apart from regular text. Longer works such as books, movies, and artworks are typically italicized, while shorter works such as articles, essays, and poem titles go in quotation marks. Following these guidelines will clarify your writing and help readers navigate your text smoothly.

In conclusion, knowing which titles to italicize in writing is essential for clarity and consistency. This guide provides a comprehensive explanation for writers to navigate this often confusing aspect of formatting.

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You Want Italics Where? 14 Places The Chicago Manual of Style Asks for Italics

15 June, 2022

Italics are like fancy dress for words. Seeing a word in italics is like going into your local grocery store and seeing someone working there in a samurai costume. “Well,” you think, “ you’re certainly here to tell me something.”

There are quite a lot of places we want to dress up words with italics. For some of us, there are too darn many places. As The Chicago Manual of Style ( CMOS 17, 7.50) admonishes us, “Overused, italics quickly lose their force.” But if we follow a manual like CMOS , it does say that we have to use italics in quite a few places. Here’s an exhausting—but not entirely exhaustive—list of where to use (and not to use) italics.

• For emphasis. But, as CMOS 17, 7.50 admonishes, “only as an occasional adjunct to efficient sentence structure.” Some of us really like adding emphasis, but it’s a bit like laughing at your own jokes. You don’t need it if the words pack enough punch by themselves—which, generally, they should.  
• In place of underlining. But if you’re presenting transcriptions of handwritten letters, you may prefer to keep underlining as underlining—especially if there’s also double underlining, or if you want to add your own emphasis: “We wish you would come as soon as possible to retrieve your nasty little dog, which has destroyed all the rose bushes ” [italics added].  
• For titles of books, magazines, and albums (but not of short stories, songs, or poems—unless they’re book-length poems). Basically, if it’s a whole publication of its own that you can hold in your hand, it gets italics; if it’s just a part of one of those, it goes in quotes. However, if a play or novel is included in an anthology, it still gets italics. And, on the other hand, even if you’re holding in your hand the one-sided twelve-inch extended-play single of “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” by Kiss, it’s still not in italics, because it’s just one song, even if it does go on for almost eight minutes.
• Not for the periods or commas following those titles, in most instances. The following punctuation is not part of the title, after all. This is where the eagle-eyed editors really get their bragging rights. Don’t believe me? Just search “italicized period” on Twitter to find all the editors posting their wins. This principle also holds true when you’re using italics for emphasis: the punctuation is only italicized if it’s part of what’s emphasized (“Your mom is arriving tomorrow ?” “ Yup! ”).
• Not for words in those titles that would normally be in italics. Got that? Italics are like an on/off switch: if it’s already on, you have to turn it off to signify italics-within-italics, such as when a title uses a scientific name (see below about those): Winnie the Ursus arctos : A Child’s First Taxonomy Book . The exception is when a book title mentions another book’s title within it; then you use quotation marks: Fear and Loathing in Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”.  
• For abbreviations of those titles. The Chicago Manual of Style is, for short, CMOS , not CMOS. Enough said.  
• For words taken from other languages. The counsel of CMOS 17, 7.53, is “Use italics for isolated words and phrases from another language unless they appear in Webster’s or another standard English-language dictionary.” But, they add, “If a word from another language becomes familiar through repeated use throughout a work, it need be italicized only on its first occurrence.” And on top of this, “This rule does not extend to proper nouns, which can generally appear in roman type (except for titles of books and the like).” The trick here is the question of how familiar the word is. Because the English language has stolen so much of its vocabulary from other languages, and because italics are so very self-conscious, if there’s any question whether italics are necessary, it’s safer not to use them, as the CMOS Shop Talk blog (But, per Chicago Style, we always italicize the Latin sic , as in “He said he was totally thicc [ sic ].”)  
• For words qua words. That means when you’re talking about the word itself as a word rather than using it for its meaning. For example, “Pulchritude is beauty, but the word pulchritude is rather ugly.”  
• For the names of ships. For example, “The USS Enterprise may have seemed to go where no one has gone before. However, the Ever Given tried the route never taken: a sharp right turn into the desert. It didn’t get far.”
• For certain scientific names. This includes genes ( BRCA1 ), the first three letters of enzyme names ( Bam HI), and genus and species of living things ( Cannabis sativa spontanea )—but not higher levels such as kingdom, phylum, class, order, or family (e.g., Cannabaceae). Sometimes the common name of something is also its scientific name—we seem to do this especially to things that could kill us, like Boa constrictor , Tyrannosaurus rex , and E. coli . In such cases, check your reference dictionary: if it allows a lower-case common use, you don’t need italics for that (“Have you seen my pet boa constrictor?”); otherwise, you do (“That man is an absolute E. coli ”).
• In various ways in legal citations. This includes titles of articles and chapters, certain formal legal terms, and names of cases in running text—but not in citations. If you’re working with legal citations, you should have a copy of The Bluebook . If you’re not, count your blessings.
• For certain mathematical constants and variables. You may run into a few of these in ordinary text, such as e = mc ² , or the p value of a study’s results and the n of its subjects. But, look, mathematical text doesn’t stop at italics. It veers off into a wide variety of different type faces. If you’re editing equations, you’ll know all about that already. If you’re not, keep walking, eyes forward, whistling a happy tune.
• For stage directions. If you’re editing plays, you probably know this, but if you’re editing a book that just happens to quote from, say, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale , it behooves you to know that it’s to be set like this:

Well may I get aboard! This is the chase: I am gone for ever. Exit, pursued by a bear

• For rhyme schemes. CMOS singles these out for special mention. For instance, you would use abab to indicate a quatrain of alternating rhymes, like this:

Roses are prickly, Anthuriums are phallic; Chicago is stickly On matters italic.

An Easier Way to Check Italics

The list of rules and exceptions is daunting, and that’s just following one style manual. What if you then have to consider house styles and industry conventions or individual client preferences? And then there are all the situations where you shouldn’t use italics, such as terms that require italics only on first use and not using italics at the end of the sentence? Even for those with the sharpest eyes and memories, it’s hard to avoid tripping up.

Fortunately, there is technology out there that can help! PerfectIt for MS Word has a whole range of consistency checks, including italicization. Its regular checks include a list of common terms from Latin, French, and German that may or may not be italicized, depending on your style guide. It also has The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt built in. Turning on this feature adds to its regular italics check with hundreds of terms from Latin, French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Japanese, and other languages that are likely to appear in an English-language context. They also include many representative instances where italics are required.

PerfectIt can’t reasonably check everything that’s in italics; literally everything you could italicize could be the name of some work or vessel: an epic poem titled too darn many , for instance, or a sailboat named Yup! But it covers quite a lot, and it teaches you the principles and reminds you to look for other similar instances.

Are you using PerfectIt yet? If not, download the free trial . If you are, make sure you have The Chicago Manual of Style upgrade—it’s available for all PerfectIt users with a subscription to CMOS .

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Italics: The Dos and Don’ts

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I spend a lot of my editing hours at ProofreadingPal dealing with wayward italics, so let’s talk about times when they are used properly and when they aren’t.

Do: Some Titles

Some titles are italicized, and some are put in quotation marks. My handy rule of thumb is to think of titles in terms of being heavy and light.

A play is heavy: Waiting for Godot . An act is light: “Act 2: The Judgment.”

A magazine/journal is heavy: Fox and Hound . An article is light: “Better Oral Horse Health.”

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Movies and TV shows are heavy: The Fugitive . An episode is light: “Viking Bikers from Hell” (extra points if you can name the TV show for that one).

A series of reports is heavy: US Treasury Dept. Reports on Global Finance . A single report is light: “Iran Economics.”

Don’t: Vocal Emphasis

This is the #1 misuse of italics. Fortunately, I’ve got a whole other post on how you should use sentence structure to create emphasis, not italics, bold, all-caps, and the like.

To put it briefly, the idea is that people shouldn’t need italics to get the meaning of what you’re saying. Besides , cuing the readers over and over that they should stress this word and then this word gets irritating .

Let the words do the talking, not the font.

Do: References (MLA, APA, Chicago)

Reference styles vary greatly with MLA , APA , and Chicago , but they do tend to follow the idea that “heavy” titles get italicized.

Don’t: Comparison Emphasis

Similar to vocal emphasis, this use of italics assumes readers are too stupid to figure out the important words on their own.

It’s clear when I say that being candid is quite different from being genuine which two words are being compared. Italicizing them does nothing. See for yourself:

Being candid is quite different from being genuine .

Do: Introducing/Defining a Term

APA and increasingly Chicago call for a term to be italicized when you’re introducing/defining the term, though this should be done only once.

For example:

There are three basic types of color work in knitting. Slip stitching involves knitting with one yarn color for two rows then switching to another color for the next two rows. Fair isle knitting brings two or more colors along for the ride on all rows. Intarsia involves knitting with alternate yarns on the same row by using separate yarn skeins. Intarsia can get quite complicated compared to fair isle, which is also called stranded color work .

Don’t: Common Non-English Terms

Almost all of English comes from some other language, though some words seem more “foreign” than others. Once a French, Spanish, German, Latin, or whatever term becomes commonly used, you don’t put it in italics anymore, such as:

• Café au lait
• Fleur-de-lis

(The exception is some scientific names no matter how often they’re used.)

Do: The Written Word

This is primarily for fiction writing. When you have a character read a sign or a letter, it’s traditional for the words to be italicized.

She walked out of the door marked Private .

A happy ProofreadingPal client wrote to Julia:

Thank you so much for your great editing work. BTW, excellent shoes.

Don’t: Epigraphs

It can be fun to put little thoughts and quotes at the beginning of chapters and long passages, but don’t put them in italics.

Do: Thought-Speak

Again, this is a fiction thing. While spoken dialogue goes in quotation marks (unless you’re James Joyce ), when characters are thinking to themselves or telepathically communicating with someone else, the words get italicized.

The lights in the bedroom began to flicker. Great , Dean thought. That’s either a bad bulb or some showboating ghost .

In a related vein, dialogue that’s “off screen” goes into italics as well, such as a voice on the other end of a phone or the announcer’s voice on TV.

Don’t: Long Passages

Finally, italics are hard to read. A page full of that slanted script is severely off-putting. You need to figure out ways around that when you can. If a whole chapter is going to be a letter, have mercy on the readers’ eyes and use plain text. Bend the rules if you’re writing need to. Got a heated argument among fifteen telepaths? Figure something out.

And it’s worth repeating: don’t use italics for simple emphasis unless you really, really need to.

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Home > Blog > Tips for Online Students > Tips for Students > When To Italicize – The Rules You Need To Know

Tips for Online Students , Tips for Students

When To Italicize – The Rules You Need To Know

Updated: June 19, 2024

Published: June 30, 2020

English has a lot of grammatical rules to keep in mind. From the usage of commas to capitalization, knowing how to write properly is an important skill to hone for those in school and beyond. Whether you are writing research papers or formal letters, you’ll come across instances of italicization. Knowing when to italicize is an important skill to master.

Let’s take a look at how italics came to exist and when to italicize. With this guide, you’ll soon be an italics pro!

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

The history behind italics.

Italics is when a typeface is slanted to the right. Like this!

Italics are used to distinguish words from other parts of the text and draw attention. Like underlining, it can create emphasis; therefore, you wouldn’t want to both underline and italicize the same word. Yet, underlining and italicizing may often be used interchangeably.

Underlining was the precursor to italicizing. Once word processors and printers became more sophisticated to handle italics, it has become a popular alternative to underlining.

When To Italicize

With this being said, using italics isn’t always a choice of personal preference. There are rules and guidelines to follow to know when to italicize. Let’s take a look at some of the rules!

7 Rules For Italics

1. emphasis.

Want a word or phrase to stand out in a block of text? Try writing in italics. Example: I went to grab pizza with friends today. It was so delicious that I ate an entire pie. (Notice how you read the word “so” with more emphasis than the rest of the words in that statement).

2. Titles Of Work

The titles of works should be italicized (or underlined). Examples include:

• Books – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Newspapers – The Los Angeles Times
• Movies – The Dark Knight
• Magazines – People
• Plays – A Streetcar Named Desire
• Works of Art – Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas
• TV/radio programs – Friends
• CDs/albums – Drake’s Views

3. Articles

Based on the above, you may be questioning, “Are articles italicized?” Articles are shorter forms of work. As such, they are put into quotation marks rather than italicized. For example, you could write something like: In his article “A Mystery Explained” for The New York Times, the author exposed the details of the crime.

4. Foreign Words

If you’re writing in one language but you want to introduce a word in another language, you may consider italicizing it. For example, “The word for war in Spanish is guerra.”

5. Names Of Trains, Ships, Spaceships

Words that are names of transportation vehicles (with the exception of cars) are italicized. For example, the space shuttle Challenger is in italics.

6. Words As Reproduced Sounds

If you want to write out the way something sounds, then you can leverage italics. To depict, “The bees went bzzz in my ear.” This doesn’t mean that you would write verbs that are sounds in italics. (i.e., “There was a loud thud.”)

7. Words As Words

When you are writing a word to use it as a word for reference, then you can put it in italics. For example, “He defined close in context of the situation as being within 6 feet of each other.”

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Examples for when to use italics.

There are various writing formats that have slightly different rules. When you’re writing a scholarly paper, you may be advised to write in MLA format or APA format.

The MLA format may allow for interchangeability between italics and underlines. In the APA format, these are some examples of when to use and when not to use italics — and they aren’t always in line with the examples above. In APA format, for example, you should not use italics just for emphasis.

So before writing any scholarly paper, it’s useful to double check the rules for italics according to the specific guidelines.

Use Italics

• First introduction to a new term – i.e., “ Communism is defined as, ‘ a form of government…’”
• Titles of book and web pages – i.e., “ Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson”
• English letters used as math symbols – i.e., “Solve for the variable x .”
• Anchors of scale – i.e., “Rate your experience on a scale of 1 ( extremely dissatisfied ) to 10 ( extremely satisfied )”
• First use of words in a different language – i.e., “She was the crème de la crème .”

Do Not Use Italics

• For the title of book series – i.e., “the Dan Brown series”
• Punctuation around italics – i.e., “( extremely dissatisfied )”
• Words from foreign languages that are in the dictionary of the language you are writing – i.e., “per se”

Things To Remember

This list of rules and exceptions can feel overwhelming. And there’s still more to learn and remember on top of the points above! Keep in mind:

• Don’t italicize the titles of songs, chapters in books, or poems. Instead, use quotations. For example, you could write: On the Drake album Views, I really like the song “Fire & Desire.”
• Don’t italicize religious texts – i.e., the Torah or the Koran. Instead, these are capitalized.
• Don’t underline and italicize together like this . (That sure is painful to read!)

Although there is a lot to remember when it comes to what to italicize, the good news is that you can always research whether or not something should be italicized online or refer back to this list!

Italics Or Not? That Is The Question

As a student, it’s important to fine tune your grammar skills now so that when you graduate and enter the workforce, you can produce exemplary work every time!

As mentioned, when writing research papers or any other academic paper, your professor will share what standards they want you to abide by. Whether it’s MLA or APA formats, you can look up the rules for when to italicize before and during the writing process.

Then, when you edit, be sure to check all your usages of underlines, italics, and quotation marks to ensure they are implemented correctly!

In this article

At UoPeople, our blog writers are thinkers, researchers, and experts dedicated to curating articles relevant to our mission: making higher education accessible to everyone. Read More

Italics and Quotation Marks

Italics and quotation marks are used to draw attention to text. For example, italics are used to draw attention to key terms and phrases when providing definitions and to format parts of reference list entries (e.g., titles of books and periodicals). Quotation marks are used to present linguistic examples and titles of book chapters and articles in the text.

When writers follow guidelines for the use of italics and quotation marks, their papers become more consistent and readable.

Note that this category addresses the use of quotation marks other than in the presentation of direct quotations. For information on how to use quotation marks when presenting quotations, see the In-Text Citations category .

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The Italicization of Names like Facebook

In our editorial policy, we treat the web as a publication medium like others. We don’t give it special treatment unless something inherent in the medium calls for doing so.

Titles of free-standing works in print are italicized, and so are such works on the web. This policy is clear-cut for online works with a single author like People of Color in European Art History . Other sites, like Wikipedia , have a collective authorship but are unified works all the same. Further out on the spectrum, a site like Facebook has no unifying authorial mission: it’s a template filled by independent authors. Yet all authorship there takes place under a heading, Facebook , and the constraints of the template give a character to the content, however minimal.

A good editorial policy should be simple and not demand hairsplitting by writers, editors, or readers. Typography offers few tools for conveying conceptual distinctions. We think that the least vexed approach is to use a single format for all three titles above (and the titles of all other websites). To argue that Facebook is fundamentally unlike the other two would require a definition establishing the difference—a definition that can clearly divide all other sites into one of the two categories. The definition would be endlessly debatable, given all the variations in online publication.

There are also practical benefits to italicizing Facebook , Google+ , and so on. The italicization results in more readable prose in a tech-heavy discussion that includes many unitalicized capped terms (acronyms, trademarks, names of companies). Further, the style allows for typographic distinction between titles of sites and similar names of companies. Just as italics helpfully mark the difference between The New York Times (the newspaper) and the New York Times Company, so they allow a useful distinction in “a posting on Facebook ” versus “the CEO of Facebook.”

Beth Seiler 04 August 2016 AT 01:08 PM

I have a question. I have been told by two respected and educated people: one says to italicize all works, the other, no changes with italics and quotation marks for writings. Has MLA changed the punctuation so that now all works no matter how small all should be italicized? Thank you for clearing up this controversy.

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Nigel Bradley 25 November 2017 AT 05:11 PM

Not all works are italicized. Some use quotation marks. A good rule of thumb is to use the "container" approach. If a work is small enough that it can be contained in a larger work, it goes in quotation marks. Short stories and poems (short works) are contained in larger works (books). Thus short works are in quotation marks. The longer works, or containers, go in italics: books, movies, websites, video games, albums, etc., are all longer works that could contain shorter works (chapters, scenes, articles, levels, songs, etc.).

CYNTHIA CURRENT 21 April 2019 AT 01:04 PM

I found this thread when searching for appropriate expression of the name of app. I lean toward italics because they do not seem to meet the definition of being contained in a larger work.

Brian Orland 12 January 2022 AT 12:01 PM

I have a PhD student writing about the development of an app, so the word appears repeatedly. Should it simply be written as app or differentiated in some way such as italicized or bold? In a sentence, it is so brief that it often does not get consciously read, so I have to re-read to get the meaning and "see" the word.

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Italics and Quotation Marks

Q. I am the managing editor of a business journal. Many of the authors I edit put the word “learn” in quotation marks when it applies to AI. For example, “The algorithm can be trained to ‘learn’ how people interact.” Does CMOS approve of this usage, or does it prefer to allow AI to learn like the rest of us, free from quotation marks?

A. CMOS would approve (or rather its editors would), but only if the author needs to make a point about the nature of learning and isn’t simply trying to be clever, and provided the device isn’t overused (once is usually enough). A bit of editorial pushback along those lines might get your authors to drop the quotation marks. If that doesn’t work, you might remind them that it’s called artificial intelligence for a reason. Using so-called scare quotes around learn (or respond or any other word normally associated with living beings) would tend to belabor the obvious. (For more on scare quotes, see CMOS 7.57 .)

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]

Q. If direct internal dialogue is set in italics, should the comma before the dialogue tag be set in italics or roman? CMOS 6.2 is very fuzzy on this. For example: “I lied, he thought, but maybe she will forgive me.” Imagine that the dialogue itself is set in italics. Should the first comma be italicized?

A. Good question! The comma after “lied” would be required both with the speaker tag (“I lied, he thought”) and without (“I lied, but maybe . . .”), so it could be said to belong to both the dialogue and the narrative. But adding quotation marks (as if the dialogue were speech) will suggest an answer:

“I lied,” he thought, “but maybe she will forgive me.”

I lied, he thought, but maybe she will forgive me.

The comma and period that are inside the closing quotation marks in the first version are in italics in the second version, whereas the comma after thought stays in roman. The difference is minuscule (without the bold for italics, would anyone notice?), and our solution is arbitrary. But it’s easy enough to understand and apply, so maybe we’ll make it a rule someday.

Q. Are reverse italics [i.e., roman text in an otherwise italic context] used when a legal case includes names of newspapers that would normally be italicized on their own? Thank you!

A. The name of a newspaper or other periodical would be italicized in the name of a court case—just like the name of any other entity. The Bluebook , a widely used citation guide that we recommend for citing court cases and the like (see CMOS 14.269 ), includes a relevant example: Seattle Times v. Univ. of Wash. (see section B10.1.1 in the 21st ed. of The Bluebook [2020]).

That Bluebook example is intended to illustrate two principles: (1) an initial The in the name of a party to a cited case can be omitted (a rule that applies to both names in the Seattle Times case), and (2) abbreviations can be used for certain terms, including state names and words like “University.”

And though that example isn’t supposed to show the use of italics for case names (which in Bluebook usage depends on context), it does suggest that a newspaper name within the name of a court case doesn’t merit any special typographic treatment. That’s probably because the name “Seattle Times” is, in this context, that of a publishing company rather than a publication (publications don’t argue cases, but their publishers do).

Q. Hello, I’m wondering how to style the name of a television program that has been assimilated into the cultural lexicon so that references to it are not truly references to the show. In particular, an author said, “When I landed at the airport, it was as if I had entered the Twilight Zone.” (He makes many references to this.) I feel it should be capitalized but not italicized, but I can’t find anything to say one way or another. Can you help? Thanks!

A. In your example, you’re right—the reference isn’t to the television show; rather, it’s to the fictional realm made famous by the show. So we agree with your treatment. Had your example been worded instead as follows, italics (and a capital T for The ) would have been correct: “When I landed at the airport, it was as if I had arrived on the set of The Twilight Zone .”

Q. Would you italicize “x” in a phrase like “x number of dollars”? It seems like a variable, but I wasn’t sure if this casual use merited italics.

A. When an ordinary expression is borrowed from a specialized discipline like math, any basic convention that would be recognized by nonspecialists can often be retained, even in casual usage. For example, Chicago style is to italicize the n in “ n th degree” (see CMOS 9.6 ); by extension, we would write “ x number of dollars” (with the letter x in italics). As you suggest, these letters act like variables, which in math are usually italicized.

Another approach that’s common in published works is to use a capital X (normally without italics): “X number of dollars.” A capital X can stand in for anything that’s unknown or mysterious in some way—as in “X factor” or “X marks the spot”—and it’s arguably easier to read than a lowercase x . But either choice should work well as long as you’re consistent.

Q. Should sounds made by animals or objects be italicized when they aren’t part of dialogue (e.g., “quack,” “choo choo,” etc.)?

A. Though not required, such italics might have their place. Italics are common in fiction for unspoken discourse (as for a narrator’s thoughts). Such italics signal to readers that the words come from somewhere other than the narrative or dialogue. Consider also the convention used by many video captioners of italicizing words spoken off-screen. Meow. (Sorry, our editorial assistant must be hungry again.) If you do end up deciding that italics would work for you, try not to overuse them.

Q. Should the common name of a species from a non-English language be treated as a foreign word and italicized, or should it be left in roman type? I’m thinking of the bird known as a po‘ouli in Hawaii, which is elsewhere called the black-faced honeycreeper. Should po‘ouli be italicized?

A. Though it’s not listed in Merriam-Webster (as of July 5, 2022), the name po‘ouli seems to be relatively well established in recent English-language publications that discuss that bird ( sadly reported extinct in 2021 ); in fact, a Google search for “black-faced honeycreeper” brings up “po‘ouli” first, suggesting it’s more common now than the common English name. So you shouldn’t need italics to refer to a po‘ouli except when using the name as a word (as in the first sentence above and the last sentence in your question).

But if you were to refer to, for example, a Deutscher Schäferhund —the German name for a German shepherd—italics would help signal that the German name would not normally be used in an English-language context (except, for example, to let readers know what that name is).

In sum, sometimes it’s necessary to go beyond the dictionary as a rough gauge of a term’s familiarity in English contexts. For the glottal stop (or ‘okina ) in po‘ouli , see CMOS 11.70 (under “Hawaiian”). For advice on capitalizing dog breeds, see this Q&A .

Q. Robots are being named and even developing personalities, not just in fiction, but in the real world. Should their names be italicized—i.e., “I told Benjamin to wait at the coffee shop,” where Benjamin is a robot with artificial intelligence?

A. Italics for robot names could be fun in fiction; however, that doesn’t seem to be the convention either in fiction or in real life. (An exception is generally made for named spacecraft and the like, including the robotic Mars rover Perseverance ; see CMOS 8.116 .) Before you decide what to do, consider asking some robots to weigh in.

Q. Should the apostrophe in an italicized word in possessive plural form be italicized? Example: If I italicize the possessive form of the word pirates , would the apostrophe also be italicized?

A. That depends. If you’re referring to the plural possessive form of the word pirates as a word, then italicize the whole thing, including the apostrophe: pirates’ . But if you’re using italics for emphasis, leave the apostrophe in regular text. For example, “It was the pirates ’ ship, not mine, that sank.”

The difference, however, between ’ and ’ will go unnoticed by most readers—even those of us who scrutinize such things for a living—so let’s switch to the singular to confirm our choices. To refer to the possessive pirate’s as a word, you’d put the whole thing in italics (as it is styled in this sentence). But for emphasis—that is, to single out the pirate ’s ship as opposed to some other ship—italics are best reserved for pirate alone (as styled in this sentence, between the dashes). Even in the singular, this is an extremely fine distinction that will go unnoticed by many. But it recognizes that the possessive ending can be considered independently of the word to which it attaches, as “belonging to” would be in “the ship belonging to the pirate .” That final period, in case you’re wondering, isn’t in italics.

For italics for emphasis, see CMOS 7.50 ; for words used as words, see CMOS 7.63 .

Q. Hello CMOS ! A book I am copyediting contains a text message inside quotation marks (as in, My friend then texted me: “Have you read XYZ?”). The text message in question contains a book title. Would you set the book title in italics, or leave it in roman, as it presumably was in the original text message? Thanks for your help!

A. For the text message to be fully believable, it needs to feel like a text message. So leave the italics out. If you’re afraid of ambiguity, use the narrative to supply the missing context (“She was referring to the book by So-and-So”). But in ordinary fictional dialogue, apply the italics to help your readers; it’s understood that people don’t speak in edited text, so you don’t have to worry about authenticity. For some additional considerations, see “Formatting Text Messages in Fiction” at CMOS Shop Talk .

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Do You Use Quotation Marks or Italics for Song and Album Titles?

by Liz Bureman | 40 comments

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Are you making any playlists for the new year? I love music, and when I write about a song or album, I know when to use quotation marks and when to use italics. Do you? Are song titles italicized? Let's discuss. 

I love music. I've been teaching myself to play guitar, and I can stumble my way through four or five songs without wanting to poke holes in my eardrums, but my main appreciation for music is when other people play it. I'm an avid Spotify user, and I take a lot of pride in my ability to make kickass playlists. One of my girlfriends has even given me the green light to create her hypothetical wedding reception playlist.

Not everyone writes out the titles of their favorite songs or music albums regularly, so it's no surprise I sometimes hear people ask, “Are song titles italicized?”

The answer is no.

Here's how it works:

Song Titles in Quotation Marks

Song titles are always surrounded by quotation marks, like *NSYNC's “Bye Bye Bye,” or “A Whole New World” from Disney's Aladdin .

Anytime you write out the title of a song, you'll put that song title in quotation marks according to standard grammar rules. Think of a song as a shorter work like a short story. Short story titles are always in quotation marks. 

Album Titles in Italics

Musical album titles, on the other hand, are always italicized. For example, while I will openly admit to loving Journey's power ballad song “Faithfully,” I think pretty much every song on their Greatest Hits album should be sung at karaoke nights across the country.

When you write out an album title, you'll put it in italics.

It may help to remember that the music album is a longer work, like a novel. Titles of books are also written in italics in most major style guides. 

Are Song Titles Italicized in Classical Music?

Classical music isn't typically arranged into an album, per se, but the general rule still applies. The shorter songs and movements would be in quotation marks. If it is a full length longer composition, like a full sonata, concerto, or opera then use italics for titles indicating the full work.

For example: The aria “Der Hölle Rache” is probably the most famous piece in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute . 

Other Italics Questions

Of course, lots more media have titles than just songs and albums. There are books , short stories, podcasts, TV shows, episodes . . . the list goes on and on. Want more italics advice? Check out our ultimate title-writing guide for answers to all your italics conundrums.

Do you have any tricks for remembering when to use quotes and when to use italics? Tell us in the comments .

Imagine your favorite musical artist or group is discussing the set list for an upcoming show that has the potential to go viral. What will they play to appeal to fans, old and new?

Take fifteen minutes and write about the hypothetical conversation the ladies of the group had in determining the songs they would play for the show. Post your conversation in the Pro Practice Workshop , and leave notes for other writers brave enough to publish as well. Not a part of a writing community yet? Join us !

Liz Bureman

Liz Bureman has a more-than-healthy interest in proper grammatical structure, accurate spelling, and the underappreciated semicolon. When she's not diagramming sentences and reading blogs about how terribly written the Twilight series is, she edits for the Write Practice, causes trouble in Denver, and plays guitar very slowly and poorly. You can follow her on Twitter (@epbure), where she tweets more about music of the mid-90s than writing.

40 Comments

It was blowing up a storm when we started to practice, but that don’t stop Effie.  He thinks you gotta play no matter what.  If the tornado sirens go off down in town and one of our old ladies calls to tell us so, he’ll say, “Ya’ll can go get in your fraidey holes if you want to.  Me, I’m playing my fiddle.”

Well, you can’t go to the storm cellar with your tail between your legs, so we stay, me and Vander and Larry, even though Larry, who plays the washtub, lost his house in the tornado of ’96 and he shakes when the sky rumbles.  And then Effie’ll start in on some song like “When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” just to put his spin on how things might turn out if a twister does find us.

So we’re playing, me on the bass, and we’re looking out the window, where you can see the sky turning the color of a two-day bruise, and Larry’s sweating and Vander’s got his eyes shut like he does when he plays mandolin, and Effie, truth be told, is a flat-out bully.  So he’s getting the show list together and acting like everything’s business as usual.

“I think we should start with “Sitting On The Front Porch,” he says.  Crowd pleaser, every time.  And then, “Baby’s Little Shoes.” And then “Walking With Clementine” for the old folks.  We’ll finish with “God Bless the U.S.A,” since the veteran’s home is bringing a bus.

Lightning is hitting closer, the sky like the Fourth of July.  Larry’s done sat down, turned all pale as fresh milk.  Larry’s a big man.  He can’t button his overalls up all the way on the side, so when he doubles over and then falls out of the fold-up chair, none of us knows what to do.

“I ain’t doing mouth-to-mouth,” Effie says, while the rest of us are trying to right him. 

Larry comes to soon enough, just as the hail starts.

“My new truck,” he says, and shakes his head. You know when people say you’re green at the gills? Well, Larry is.

All our trucks are parked outside, and all of ‘em are getting blasted.  I see my old Dodge, the one I’ve had since May left me, the hail, big as cotton bols hitting it, and it makes me sick.

And then I remember Effie’s truck.  His is in the carport.  Well, sure it is, I think.

Vander, who preaches every other Sunday over in the Cavanaugh bottoms, says, “Shit fire,” and hits the wall.  We are in the town hall of Rudy, a little Craftsman house donated by Mayor Giles Walker’s family when he passed, and the photos of the veterans shake when he does it.

The rain flashes down.  Pounding everything, soaking through my back windshield that was shattered by the hail.

“Mercy sakes,” is all I can say.

Larry stands up, grabbing my arm to do it.  He’s about as wide as he is tall, and he’s near about pulls me down.

“I’m off like a prom dress,” he says, “so don’t try to stop me.”  And then he turns to Effie.

“You’re about as helpful as a boar with teats,” he says, you know that? You act like you’re the bread and butter of The Frog Bayou Boys.”  He points to me.  “But Columbus here, he might not play as good as you like, but he’s the one got the news folks out here to do that story calling us the best band in the River Valley.  And he books every show, and when you get drunk, let’s just be honest here, when you get drunk, you can’t play worth shit.”

Effie came after Larry.  Effie’s a little action figure of a man, but he fights mean, and it took Vander and me to stop him.

We were holding Effie by his scrawny arms, and he was kicking, his cowboy boots flying off the wood floor, so that we were mostly holding him up.

“You are a liar and a snake,” Larry Brammel.  “A liar and a snake.  You’re going to go straight to hell with gasoline drawers on, and when you do, I’ll play my fiddle on your grave.”

Vander stepped in.  “Ya’ll cut it out.  Nobody’s dying,” he said.  “Effie,” he said, and pointed, “you and Larry need to quit showing your butts. That show on Saturday pays $100, plus they feed us.  We ain’t had a show like that since we played that Red, White and Bluegrass gig for the rich ladies who wanted to dress up in thousand dollar boots and wear tight jeans and drink beer in front of their husbands.”

And then Vander bowed up, like I never seen him do before.  “And Effie, we ain’t playing “Walking With Clementine.” The old folks can do without it for one dang night.  I wrote my own song and I want to sing it.  It’s called “She Broke My Heart And Stole My Wallet.” That’ll get ‘em going,” Vander said. 

I’d known Vander thirty-two years, and that was the first I’d heard of his songwriting.  His new girlfriend, the one who brought over the Mexican casserole when Vander’s wife died, was likely the inspiration for this new tune.

Word was, she was over in Branson now, hooked up with a cowboy singer who wore a Bolo tie and colored his hair.

Effie face was red.  He looked hotter than blue blazes, like he might catch fire at any minute.  And then he backed down, his shoulders falling.  He looked at all of us, me and Larry and Vander, and then he said, “Fine, that’s fine with me.  I been carrying you ya-hoos for way too long.”

Larry cuffed him on the arm, and then they shook hands, and the rain fell, and the thunder roared, but nobody moved for a minute. 

Effie had a bottle in his fiddle case, and he went to get it.  “Ain’t nobody driving till the rain stops,” he said.  “And that includes you, Larry.”

And then we sat down, and passed the bottle until Vander started singing.  “I loved a girl from Minnesota.  Loved her with a passion true.  And then stole my dad burn wallet, took it out and followed you.  You must be a handsome cowboy.  You must look like Johnny Cash.  But when I find my little Cindy, I will tell her that she’s trash.”

We were laughing then.  And Effie brought out his fiddle, and I picked up my bass, and Vander his mandolin.  Larry drug out the washtub, and we got back at it, the Frog Bayou Boys, just as good as new.

Wow, Marla, if you’re not from those parts then you’ve got one wild imagination, girl! Well done, and then some. The phrasing, the way you used the anarchic terminology, and even the names were spot on, perfect. Beautiful!

 Thank you, Yvette.  I can’t take credit.  I live with these people and these voices.  It’s like music to me.  We get teased A LOT but I wouldn’t trade the dialect or the cadence for anything. 

I love this!!!  The gig, the music, the attitudes.  And the dialogue is genuine county-folk!  Good work, Marla!

You’re so nice.  I love the music we have in the South, the twangy, ball-your-eyes-out stuff that connects us all and makes us feel less alone.  And I know men like these, I’ve heard them play, so writing this was easy.

Great writing Marla. I agree with the others you really have that dialect (which I’m also familiar with) down pat.  

Thank you, Mariaanne. Where are you from?

I live in Lynchburg Va now but was originally from Norfolk.  The accent you are writing sounds like an Appalachian accent to me. Where are you from?

Mariaanne, I live in Lynchburg, too! We have two crit groups here and would love for you to join us. Email me at charmainetdavis at yahoo dot com.

Charmaine – I can’t believe it.  Will you please email me?  [email protected].  I’d love to join you.  When and where do you meet?  

I had a playlist for my wedding that included  “One Day My Prince Will Come” and “If You Wish Upon a Star.”  Since I’m still single, it’s “The Impossible Dream.”

It depends if you’re writing for American or British publications. In the US, song titles are always “Jumping Jack Flash” but in the UK they’re often ‘Midnight Rambler’. It’s caused me no end of headaches writing for both.

They punctuate dialogue differently in the UK too don’t they?  I think the way they do it makes more sense actually but I don’t like to think about it too much or I get confused. I imagine it’s hard to write both ways.  

Agreed. The UK punctuates more logically. I had points knocked off of college papers for employing that punctuation, & tried to defend it with no success. Ha! Punctuation Wars – my kind of rebellion!

I’m in the US. In high school, I got marked off for spelling aluminum as “aluminium.” The teacher actually asked if I was British.

Ten years later, I’d still argue I was technically correct.

sorry so long to reply. Yet, after recent happenings, I can only hope that we can just get back to debating language. God Bless us All. Thanks for replying Eric Foster!!

Does also apply to other works that have a part/whole relationship? I’m thinking specifically of “short stories” and The Collection They Come in or “poems” and Chap Books.

I can’t make any italics work in this application, so I’ll indicate italics with [i] at the beginning and at the end of each title I intend to be italicized.

My practice:

The state-of-the-art bus pitched only slightly with the dips and rolls of Interstate 35 — not like those death-traps they used to ride in the ’40s and ’50s — on the way up to Fort Worth and Billy Bob’s.  He walked down the aisle toward his stateroom with the practiced sea-legs of an old salt, noticing that his harp-player, Mickey, had gone to sleep and was droolin’ in his lap. 

“HEY MICK YOUR FLY’S OPEN!”  he barked in that sargeant’s voice he could assume on a moment’s notice.  Mickey jumped awake and then amiably shot him the bird.  He laughed in his baritone voice and walked on into his quarters. 

Billy Bob’s.  Let’s see — that crowd likes the ’70s stuff off the concept albums, sprinkled ’round the edges with the early Nashville songs.  Let’s do, let’s do — he got his legal pad and licked the point of his stubby pencil — Let’s do “Bloody Mary Mornin'” and “Walkin'” from [i]Phases and Stages[i].  Follow that with “Hello Walls” from [i]And then I Wrote[i].  He sat before the big window and watched the country roll by, remembering.  Remembering. 

The world was a different place when I got started.  I’m an extrememly lucky man, he thought.  All the close shaves — I could easily have gone the way of Hank.  All  the little one-horse planes I’ve flown in, I also could have had the same end as Jim Reeves, or Patsy, God love ‘er. 

Gotta do “Crazy” tonight in honor of Patsy.  That’s another’un offa [i]And Then I Wrote[i].  Sold that’un for fifty dollars when my kids needed shoes, and I’d do it again too. 

He picked up the old spanish guitar with the hole in it where his right hand had worn through the wood over the decades, and began to strum it.  Key of E.  Began to sing just a little bit, soft and low:  “In___ the twighlight glow I see__ her . . .”  And then stopped.  All those years.  All those songs.  All those changes.  Phases and stages.

Yes, I’m lucky, it’s still hard to believe just how lucky.

Gotta find a spot for “Blue Eyes” tonight too.  [i]Red-Headed Stranger[i].  

Sometimes, he realized, I look in the mirror and that’s who I see.

Wow!  I love this.  The part about the hole in the guitar is gold.  And I love your main character.  I’d go hear him, in a heartbeat. 

Thank you all for your kind comments.   The piece is about Willie Nelson, I just didn’t name him.  All of the album and song titles are real, as is the hole in his guitar;  just look closely the next time you see him playing on tv and you’ll see it.  I had a lot of fun writing this!

I’ve always been amused by Willie’s “holy” guitar. He’s such a kook.

I forgot DISQUS doesn’t allow italics. Sorry about that John. Way to make it work 🙂

That was really well done John.  It’s kind of sad to hear him thinking about old times but he seems to be a pretty happy guy overall.  I like the hole in the guitar too as well as the guy drooling in his sleep.  Gross but probably about right.  

Good article. Quick and to the point. Thanks!

Not kickass playlists if they have Journey in them lol…

It will really depend on how are you going to use those kind of quotations in your writing but I what I have observed, this kind of thing was being used by most writing especially if when they emphasized a title on their writing.

I was going to ask about the title of a composition and the movements but after reading the program magazine I realized that italics are used for both.

I think I have been doing that correctly. I was worried.

Her hand twisted the edge of her shirt as the smell of sawdust filled the air. The crowd’s noises dimmed, her heart beat louder in her ears and her palms dampened as she climbed the stage stairs. Though she had practiced long hours she was nervous anticipating singing “China Girl” from John Cougar Mellancamp’s, (italics American Fool italics), album.

You should try djing. It’s easy if you can already make a good playlist. If you’re already a good selector, all you have to do is pre-cue the next song in your headphones then drop it on the 1. Really easy stuff. You can buy the app, djay, for ios devices and log in with your spotify account for access to your playlists and stuff. We need more female djs.

My first concert experience was of one that I would not easily forget, it was Summer Jam hosted by Hot 97. The concert had a majority of middle class rappers playing their hot singles. I came there for a select few: 50 Cent, Fabolous and Young Thug. The other performing artists were mainly for the female demographic, like Fetty Wap and Ty Dolla $ign. What I really enjoyed about this concert is they did not only play songs from this current generation, they reached out to other generations as well. The biggest example of this is seeing 50 Cent preform. He played hits from his Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album all the way up to his recent The Kanan Mixtape. I was going ballistic when I heard him preform a new track “I’m the Man” and decided to take us back to 2003 with “In da Club” immediately after. The artists I came for did not disappoint.

And if you are writing dialogue, I do not recall seeing two double quotation marks at end of dialogue. Maybe I am wrong. For instance, “Baby, you know I love Ted’s “Stranglehold,”” he fired back. I have seen a single followed by a double quotation at end of dialogue after the comma or period. So maybe that’s why the King’s English prefers single over double?

This saved my essay. Thanks Liz!

Dear Liz, I was looking for some advice about quote/italics for song/movie/book titles and got totally side-tracked by your Journey reference. When I rule the world, I promise you will get your wish. Journey will be piped directly into people’s heads so they can all become happier and more well rounded. Tee Hee. Keep up the good work. 😉

The Excavators play Brady Wilkenson’s 8th Birthday Bash!

This past Saturday afternoon was Brady Wilkensen’s birthday party, and he could think of no better live entertainment than his father’s heavy metal band, The Excavators. When Brady suggested the idea, his dad felt honored, albeit unsure whether the mothers of his son’s 8-year-old classmates and friends would appreciate the lyrical content of his band’s hits, especially “Rotting Flesh” and “Glory Hole” off their latest album (i) In it for the Lingue Hall. (i)

Instead of becoming the third grade parents’ worst nightmare, Mr. Wilkensen figured he’d tone things down quite a bit to become more palatable to the kids and their discerning parents. He got the members of the Excavators together, sure, but instead of “Rock My Grave,” the afternoon’s selections included “Punk Rock Teacher” and “All My Friends Headbang” off their pseudo EP (i) Songs for the Peanut Gallery (i).

The party was to be held at Bringadown Hall, in a posh country club in the suburb where Brady and his family resided. Mr. Wilkenson figured that his band had better revamp their look for this gig as well. Instead of their usual studs and leather, the Excavators came to the party dressed in red t-shirts, jeans, and letter jackets that evoked high school in the ’70s.

The band decided to even craft some improv tunes on the subject of the party’s goings-on and present them to Brady and his guests at the end of the show. “Pizza on my Face, What a Disgrace!” did so well among Brady’s friends that the Excavators decided to include it on their upcoming album, (i) Smells like Burnt Crust (i).

Rather than the utter disgust that would have been sure to follow had the band performed its signature material, (i) Songs for the Peanut Gallery (i) was lauded by parents and children alike as a “too-cool-for-school crowd pleaser.”

Brady bragged from that day forward that he had the coolest dad in town, and his 8th birthday party became the epitome of birthday bash success in the eyes of the entirety of Willten Elementary School’s student body, whether they’d attended the party or heard about it from a friend-of-a-friend’s brother.

“Whew,” Mr. Wilkenson said to his wife when the party was over, “that was a good call!”

Thanks Liz, good info!

Here’s my sentence in question: “They just ran out the back door singing it to the tune of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’.” It is dialog, and according to what I’m reading, I should use double quotes around the song and at the end of the sentence. Correct?

thanks for the help!

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Are Band Names Italicized? (APA, AP, MLA, and Chicago)

The question of how to cite a band name in academic writing is one that confuses many people. This article looks at how to insert band names into a text in a range of formal writing styles.

Are Band Names Italicized?

Band names are not put in italics for APA, AP, MLA, or Chicago styles. However, the names of songs and albums are usually in either italics or quotation marks. Furthermore, when writing a band name in the text, a “definite article” such as “the” should be lower case.

When writing band names in an essay or a paper, you do not need to put the name of the band in capital letters. However, any “stand-alone” works that the band produced, such as songs and albums, should be in italics.

The guidance doesn’t really vary between the different style guides, which all have the same rule regarding band names.

However, some guides state that song names should be in italics, others like AP say they should be in quotation marks, and others say both.

This kind of specific detail is often down to the discretion of the institution or the teacher; however, as a general rule of thumb, it is best to use italics for APA, MLA, and Chicago styles and quotation marks for AP Style.

Here are some examples of how citing a band name in a paper would look:

• The day I saw the Who in concert was the day that they released “ My Generation”, so people were keen to hear that song.
• The day I saw the Who in concert was the day that they released My Generation, so people were keen to hear that song.
• Many believe that the Rolling Stones were much better in concert than the Beatles.

Are Band Names Quoted?

For the most part, band names are not placed in quotation marks in any style of formal writing . It is not necessary to do anything to the band name other than removing the capital letter from the word “The” if you are referring to the band in-text.

The only time you would use quotation marks on a band name is if you are directly quoting something like:

• I looked up and saw a sign in Time Square which read “The Beatles Live in Concert”.

However, if you are writing about the concert and not quoting, there would be no quotation marks.

• I went to see the Beatles in Times Square in 1965, and it was the best concert I have ever seen.

Are Band Names Italicized in APA Style?

In APA Style, it is unnecessary to put band names in italics under any circumstances . However, if you mention a song or album name in APA Style, then that should go in italics.

Here are some examples of how a band name would look if used in-text:

• The album St Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band was the most successful album by the Beatles.
• I am glad I got a chance to see Oasis before they split up.
• OK Computer was the album that propelled Radiohead to worldwide fame.

Are Band Names Italicized in AP Style?

In AP Style, it is not necessary to use italics for band names. As a matter of fact, it is not required to use italics for anything in AP Style because in the past, when “news” stories were sent via the “wire”, it was impossible to include italics. Of course, this is no longer the case today, but AP Style still does not use italics.

For individual songs or albums by a band or artist, the name should appear in quotation marks. Here are examples of how a band name would look in AP Style:

• The Stone Roses, who released the smash hit “Fool’s Gold”, were one of the most successful bands of the early 90s.
• The album “Dark Side of the Moon” was released by Pink Floyd in 1973.

Are Band Names Italicized in Chicago Style?

When citing a band in a piece of formal writing that follows the Chicago Style, it is not necessary to use italics for the band name . However, if you mention an album or song name, you should use italics for that. Also, if the word “the” appears in the band name, you should change it to lowercase when citing in-text.

Here are some examples of how a band name would look in Chicago Style:

• The album Please Please Me was the first full-length release by the Beatles.
• The first Radiohead album was called On a Friday and was released in 1986.

Are Band Names Italicized in MLA Style?

In MLA Style, it is not necessary to use italics for band names ; however, you should use italics for song and album names. Also, if the band name contains the word “the” at the start, this should be in lowercase when citing the name of a band in-text.

Here is how a band name would look in MLA Style:

• The album Let it Be was the final release of the Beatles.
• The best-selling album of the band REM was Murmur, which sold almost 2 million copies.

Are Artist Names Italicized?

The rules for artist names in APA, MLA, AP, and Chicago are the same for those of band names, which means that they should not be in italics under any circumstances . However, their work, such as songs, albums, and films, is in italics and sometimes in quotation marks, depending on the individual specifications set by the institution or professor.

Here is how an in-text citation would look for an artist’s name:

• I am glad I saw David Bowie perform live in concert before he died.
• The singer, Ian Brown of the Stone Roses, sang the lead vocal on the UNKLE song Be There.
• The singer, Ian Brown of the Stone Roses, sang the lead vocal on the UNKLE song “ Be There”.

Final Thoughts

In formal writing and essays, using italics for band names or artist names in APA, MLA, AP, or Chicago Style is not necessary. However, when mentioning songs or albums, for MLA, Chicago, and APA, they should be in italics, and for AP, they should be in quotation marks.

Martin holds a Master’s degree in Finance and International Business. He has six years of experience in professional communication with clients, executives, and colleagues. Furthermore, he has teaching experience from Aarhus University. Martin has been featured as an expert in communication and teaching on Forbes and Shopify. Read more about Martin here .

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