Handling your own headings is one thing, but how should you write the titles of other works? You need to mark them out somehow, and you have two standard options: italics or quote marks.
This is especially important in academic writing, as you’ll often have to discuss books and papers written by other people. Here, then, are some guidelines you should follow when formatting titles.
You can often spot a title from the capitalisation, but we still format titles to distinguish between different types of source. Titles of longer sources, for example, typically use italics:
Here, Kerrang! is italicised because it is the title of a magazine (i.e. a standalone work that is not one part of a larger whole). Other publications and productions that this applies to include:
The key here, then, is that italics are used for longer published works.
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We use quote marks for the title of anything that doesn’t fit in the list above. Usually, this will be something that is part of a more substantial publication, such as an article from a magazine:
In this case, we see both the magazine title and an article title. Using italics on the former and quote marks on the latter makes it immediately obvious which is which. Other cases where quote marks are required include:
In this case, the key is that quote marks are used for shorter works. However, quote marks are also used for unpublished works regardless of length (e.g. a draft manuscript or a PhD dissertation).
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