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What is Title Case?

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Sam Brown

Sam is an editor, ghostwriter and 7x Top Writer on Medium.com

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Photo of person at a desk with laptop and notepad by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Title Case is a formatting style that is often used for book titles, blog titles, article titles, newspaper titles, songs, and movies.

In a nutshell, Title Case means capitalizing important words and leaving minor words lower case.

Title Case makes your titles, headlines, or posts easier to digest by your readers and it just looks right.

Think about Lord Of The Rings. Doesn’t Lord of the Rings read better?

What about Snakes on a Plane? Doesn’t that look more natural than Snakes On A Plane or Snakes on a plane?

Properly formatting your titles to Title Case lends them a level of professionalism and it helps readers quickly process the point you’re making. It makes the heading stand out and command attention.

Get started with our free Title Case Converter now.

Title Case standards

There is no universally accepted standard for Title Case formatting. However, there are a few sets of rules that have become widely adopted to determine which words should and shouldn’t be capitalized.

The most common style guides are:

  • AMA (American Medical Association)
  • AP (Associated Press)
  • APA (American Psychological Association)
  • Bluebook
  • Chicago Manual of Style
  • MLA (Modern Language Association)
  • New York Times
  • Wikipedia

Which style guide to choose can be complicated and confusing. It will depend on several factors such as whether the organization you are writing for has a preferred style, what field you are writing for, and your own personal preferences.

Title Case Converter takes the pain out of this process.

Based on years of writing experience, we have selected the rules that make most sense in most situations, especially for non-academic online content such as blogs, content marketing, email marketing, Medium.com, and Substack.

If you’re curious as to which words should be capitalized in a title, check out our article Which Words Should Be Capitalized in a Title?

Title Case vs Sentence Case

Title Case differs from Sentence Case in that in Sentence Case, only the first word and proper nouns are capitalized. Sentence Case may lack the impact of Title Case but for longer text it can be much easier to read. For this reason, you should only use Title Case for headings, not for paragraphs or continuous text.

Check out our article When Should I Use Title Case? for helpful tips on which formatting you should use in any situation.

Or jump right in and format your heading with our Title Case Converter now.

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