There is no absolute standard for punctuating titles, but most industries have their own style guides. For scholarly work, the MLA style is preferred. The “big and small” rule can be applied to most punctuation puzzles. Titles of works of art should be italicized, while smaller works like photographs should be in quotation marks. Magazine and newspaper titles should also be italicized, but article titles should be in quotation marks. TV series names should be italicized, while episode titles should be in quotation marks. Proper names of vehicles are always italicized.
When in doubt about how a title should be punctuated, most professional writers and editors turn to a style manual. In the journalism world, editors typically use the Associated Press Stylebook, the Chicago Manual of Style, or the Modern Language Association (MLA) Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. However, there is no absolute standard on how to punctuate titles. Styles can vary by industry—for example, Western medical texts conform to the American Medical Association’s Handbook of Style—and most publishers have their own internal style guide for writers to follow. The waters can be further muddied when a style guide written for one country can conflict with other countries’ grammar rules.
For most scholarly and academic work, the MLA style is preferred. For punctuating headlines according to MLA guidelines, the standard rule is that “big stuff” is italicized and “little stuff” is put in quotation marks. Great things are works that stand on their own, like a book or an album of musical compositions. Little things are part of a bigger job, like song titles or individual pages within a website. This “big and small” rule can be applied to solving most punctuation puzzles.
An example of this would be the song “With a Little Help From My Friends” from the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Using the “big and small” rule, the correct way to punctuate this would be by putting the song title in quotes and the album title in italics. The title of a collection of poems should be italicized; individual poems within the volume would appear in quotation marks. An exception to this rule is an epic poem such as Homer’s Odyssey, because it is long enough to be published on its own as a book. Religious texts such as the Bible, Quran, and Torah are usually capitalized but not punctuated with italics or quotations.
Individual works of art are almost always in italics. Examples of this could be Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper or Michelangelo’s David. Photographs, on the other hand, are considered smaller than a work of art and therefore appear in quotation marks. A book that is a collection of photographs would be italicized, while the individual photograph titles would not. The same goes for individual short stories within a larger volume. For example: “The Gifts of the Magi” from The Complete Works of O. Henry.
Italics should be used to punctuate the titles of books, plays, films, sculptures, statues, paintings and other works of art. The names of magazines, newspapers, and websites should also appear in italics, but the titles of articles published within them should appear in quotation marks. To properly punctuate TV series or serial titles, the series name should be italicized and the title of each individual episode should be printed in quotation marks. A skit or commercial title will appear in quotation marks, not in italics. Proper names of planes, trains, spacecraft, and ships are always italicised, such as RMS Titanic.
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