June 2023: italicizing and capitalizing titles

This Quick Style Tips edition includes information related to the handling of titles. Knowing which titles are italicized and which are set in roman type and placed within quotes can be confusing. And which words are capitalized in a headline title?

Academic and administrative titles: capitalize before the name, lowercase after, for example:

  • Vice President Michael Thomas
  • Elizabeth Jones, vice president for student life.

An exception is the heading or closing of a letter:

Jane Doe   
Assistant Professor

When a title is used before a name as a descriptive tag, it is lowercased:

  • history professor Alex Reynolds
  • UO president John Wesley Johnson

Italicize titles of books, movies, TV series, newspapers, magazines, plays, video games, works of art (except works of antiquity, whose creators are often unknown, such as the Venus de Milo, and instrumental works known by their generic names and a number or key or both, such as Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 14.)

  • Braiding Sweetgrass, Guardians of the Galaxy, Breaking Bad, the New York Times, Newsweek, Twelfth Night, Fortnite, Girl with a Pearl Earring
  • The titles of  lecture series are not italicized. Individual lecture titles are enclosed in quotation marks: The first lecture in the African American Workshop Lecture Series, “Teaching for Tomorrow,” was a sellout.

Set television episodes, titles of songs, book chapters, magazine or newspaper articles, lectures, speeches, poems, etc. in roman type and enclose in quotation marks:

  • “Gray Matter” was the fourth episode in Breaking Bad; the Beatles song “Across the Universe”; the article “Movies That Move You” appeared in the spring issue of Oregon Quarterly.

Use Chicago Manual of Style headline-style capitalization in titles.

  • Capitalize the first letter of all words in a title except articles, prepositions, and the coordinating conjunctions and, but, for, or, and nor: A River Runs Through It, Rebel without a Cause, What Lies between Us.

Read more about titles in the editorial style guide. Also, see Names, Terms, and Titles of Works in the Chicago Manual of Style.

Questions? Email editor Sharleen Nelson, University Communications.