Style Manuals Clash Over Titles

Whether in high school English class or on your blog, I’m sure you’ve run into this question: how do you indicate book titles? Are you supposed to underline them? Italicize? Put them in quotation marks? Make them sparkle?

The answer is…debatable. And you thought grammar was all about hard and fast rules. 😉

I tend to go with the Chicago Manual of Style on most grammar-related questions, so I italicize. But AP claims you should use quotation marks. So far I haven’t come across any style manual that suggests sparkles, but I’ll keep looking.

How do you denote titles?

0 thoughts on “Style Manuals Clash Over Titles

  1. Keri Peardon says:

    I was always taught that you italicize book, magazine, and newspaper titles. If you can’t do italics (if you are handwriting, for instance), then you underline. Song titles, poems, and short stories are supposed to be in quotations.

    When I’m on the internet, though, and I don’t have access to either italics or underlining, I put all titles in quotation marks.

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