When you write an blog article you often wonder what is the proper way to format your title. There are many different writing styles used within the online community, however there are styles that are commonly used when writing blog title, the title case, the sentence case and the all capital case.
Title Case
This is most likely the most popular method of writing blog titles. There are many variations to this method, but here is the basic idea:
- Capitalise the first word of the title.
- Capitalise all major words. Conjunctions, articles, and short prepositions are not considered major words. (I’ve put together a list of these at the end of this post)
- Capitalise all words of four letters or more.
- Capitalise all verbs (including linking verbs), nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns.
- When a capitalised word is a hyphenated compound, capitalise both words.
- Capitalise the first word after a colon or a dash.
Examples:
- Mississippi Man Discovers Long Lost Tapes Made By Elvis Presley Before He Became Famous
- How To Get What The U.S. Government Owes You!
- Amazing New Formula From Beverly Hills
- How To Make Money With Your Credit Cards
- How To Collect Social Security at Any Age
Sentence Case
In sentence case is only used for the first letter of the first word in the sentence and for every proper noun.
This style is adopted by most newspaper publications. It is also known as the “down style” or the “reference style”.
Examples:
- D-Day hero helped liberate France but now he needs a hand
- Buckinghamshire ancient coin hoard find ‘unprecedented’
- John Lewis reports jump in online shopping on Christmas Day
All Capitals Case
Some blogs and websites use the all capitals case for their titles and headlines. Although this is not very commonly used, it is an easy solution and you can certainly never go wrong with it.
Examples:
- What Isn’t There An App for?
- American Workers Say Internet Makes Them More Productive
- European Start-Ups Struggle to Keep Pace With Venture Financing
Title Case Cheat Sheet
To help you out I’ve put together a handy cheat sheet with words that are commonly written in lower case using the title case style.
Conjunctions: and, but, or, nor, for, yet, so, after, although, as, because, before, how, if, once, since, than, that, though, till, until, when, where, whether, while
Articles: a, an, the
Prepositions: about, above, across, after, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, by, down, during, except, for, from, in, in front of, inside, instead of, into, like, near, of, off, on, onto, on top of, out of, outside, over, past, since, through, to, toward, under, underneath, until, up, upon, with, within, without