People who work in public relations must know everything about the AP format. We are going to see two widely used types of title capitalization, which are commonly used in paper titles and headlines.
When we work in the title case, you must capitalize all the major words. As for the minor words, you can keep them lowercase. Working in the sentence case, it is necessary to keep both major and minor words lowercase. The only exception in the sentence case is a proper noun, as it has to be capitalized all the time. Mathematics Past Papers and Answerss – A collection of Mathematics questions from previous years.
- What do we call major words? The major words are considered nouns, verbs, linking verbs, adverbs, pronouns, adjectives, and the rest of words, which count a minimum of four letters.
- What do we call minor words? The minor words are considered any short words, which consist of three letters or even fewer, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, etc.
The Art of Implementing Title Case
In order to present title case, it is essential to capitalize the words below in a heading/title:
- The 1st word in your heading/title, including all minor words (for example, articles);
- The 1st word of your subtitle;
- The 1st word after colons, em dashes, and ending punctuation in the heading/title;
- All the major words, which include the 2nd part of hyphenated main words (for example, “Self-Report”);
- If you use words of four letters (for example, “With”, “From”, etc.).
Do not forget to keep lowercase for all minor words, which count not more than three letters in your title/heading. The only exception to this rule is the 1st word in your title/subtitle.
- What do we call short conjunctions? We mean the following “and”, “as”, “but”, “for”, “if”, “nor”, “so”, or “yet”.
- All the articles: a/an/the.
- The examples of short prepositions: as/at/by/for/in/of/off/on/per/to/up/via.
When Should You Use a Title Case?
We recommend using a title case in the following cases:
- Reports, books, articles, and other appearing text.
Conclusion
If you want to polish your APA style, we recommend you to read the book “Train Your Mind for Peak Performance”. Analyze different works presented in this style. It will help you polish your writing skills and make an impression on journalists and the media in general. Professional journalists and publishers pay extra attention to such details. If they see a perfectly written text in a proper style, they are sure that it is highly professional in front of them. You can be sure that this skill will open a lot of doors in front of you.
