Thursday, November 1, 2007

Italics or quotation marks?

Hey everyone! I ran into another problem while typing up data at work the other day; I didn’t know when it was appropriate to use italics or quotation marks with titles. According to this site, here are the rules:

1) Short works and parts of long works are usually in quotation marks (see site for some examples).
2) Long works and collections of short works are usually underlined or put in italics (see site for some examples).
3) Traditional religious works that are foundational to a religious group or culture are capitalized, but not italicized or underlined. For instance, note the Torah, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Vedas [no italics or quotation marks].
4) Visual artwork, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, mixed media, and whatnot, is underlined or italicized, never put in quotation marks. Thus, Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Rodin’s The Thinker both get underlined or italicized.
5) The one exception to this policy is the title of your own student essay at the top of the first page. You do not need to underline your own title of put in quotation marks.

I hope this helps.

1 comment:

Pat said...

Very good, Don. I'll just add that the names of TV and radio series are italicized; however, the names of individual episodes appear with quotation marks around them.

I'll bring in something we can apply these rules to (which, by the way, are consistent with those of The Chicago Manual of Style).