Home   |   TOPIC LIST   |   About   |   Contact

Capitalisation of titles

Usually in a title you capitalise all the ‘big’ and ‘important’ words, but leave the conjunctions, articles and prepositions as lower case. You also need to capitalise the first word in a title, regardless of what type of word it is.

A Guide to Bushwalking in Australia

An Investigation into Explosions Using Gunpowder

The underlined words are the ‘unimportant’ words that don’t need to be capitalised. ‘Into’ and ‘in’ are both prepositions. More recently, to make titles more ‘visually attractive’, using minimal capitalisation is becoming more common. For these two titles, using minimal capitalisation you only capitalise words that would be capitalised in a normal sentence:

A guide to bushwalking in Australia

An investigation into explosions using gunpowder

Sometimes these rules won’t hold fast. Often we break the rules when we want to make something look a little better.

Jason’s Journey to Run a Marathon

The ‘to Run’ is an infinitive verb. It looks a little strange to have one of the words in the infinitive in lower case and the other in upper case. We can make it look better by capitalising both words, even though ‘to’ is normally an ‘unimportant’ word that doesn’t deserve to be capitalised:

Jason’s Journey To Run a Marathon