The short answer is that it depends who you ask. Many organizations and publishing houses have put together their own rules on which words should or should not be capitalized in a title.
The AMA Manual of Style, AP, APA, Bluebook, Chicago Manual of Style… And we’re only up to the ones beginning with C!
If you’d like a deep dive on the rules, you can consult our post Title Case Rules. In this article we’re not going to get too bogged down in the minutae of how every rulebook interprets the rules, so let’s just say that the following rules always apply:
- Capitalize the first word
- Capitalize the last word
- Capitalize all “important” words
As you can probably guess, the arguments start when we start debating what is “important” enough to be capitalized. Generally we:
- Capitalize adjectives, nouns, pronouns, and verbs
- Capitalize words of four letters or more
- Do not capitalize articles (a, an, the…)
- Do not capitalize coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for…)
- Do not capitalize prepositions (at, by, to, on…)
However, these rules are not universally accepted and there are significant differences between some of the style guides. This results in confusion for writers, who are often not sure which rules they should follow, and inconsistency for readers.
Unlike some other title case converters, we do not expect you to know the differences between the various rulebooks and know which one to select. Instead, based on many years of experience writing online, we have cherrypicked the rules that make the most sense in most cases, especially when formatting titles for blogs, articles, newsletters and other non-academic online content.
TitleFormat applies the following rules:
- Capitalize the first word
- Capitalize the last word
- Capitalize any words of 4 letters or more
- Do not capitalize articles (a, an, the…)
- Do not capitalize coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for…)
- Do not capitalize short prepositions (at, by, to, on…)
- Do not capitalize to in infinitives
- Capitalize the first part of a hyphenated word and subsequent parts, unless the word should be lowercased as per any of the above rules. eg “Case-by-Case”
Try it now and see what you think.