Capitalizing titles

Capitalizing Titles

Have you ever wondered why some titles have lots of capital letters, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but others don’t? Today you’ll learn the rules writers use to capitalize titles of books, movies, articles, songs, and more.

Big idea: In most titles, you capitalize the important words.

You usually capitalize:

• First word of the title

• Last word of the title

• Nouns (dog, city, teacher)

• Verbs (run, is, were)

• Adjectives (beautiful, tiny)

• Adverbs (quickly, very)

• Pronouns (he, she, it, their)

You usually do NOT capitalize (unless it’s the first/last word):

• a, an, the

• and, but, or, nor

• in, on, at, to, of, for, with (short prepositions)

By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to take a messy title like
“the secret of the old clock”
and fix it to:
The Secret of the Old Clock ✅