Making Sense of Title Style Rules

One copyediting task that should be easy but can be a nightmare is how to capitalize the titles of works, such as books, magazines, articles, and songs—what The AP Stylebook refers to as “compositions.”

The task should be as simple as following a manuscript’s style guide, applying either sentence capitalization or headline capitalization.

But the task is not as simple as it seems, particularly for copyeditors who frequently work in more than one style.

Sentence Capitalization

Sentenc...