You are viewing all posts tagged titles of works
Yes. Student writers should place the titles of individual tales in quotation marks. This follows from the MLA Handbook’s general guideline for the styling of titles: “A title is placed in quotation marks if the source is part of a larger work” (25): “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” appears in The Canterbury Tales. The only tales . . .
Published 2 January 2019
A preposition that is not at the start or end of a title should be lowercased, no matter how many words compose it and no matter how long those words are. A few examples: according to as regards concerning except for other than Some other styles capitalize a preposition or a word that belongs to . . .
Published 1 January 2019
Yes. A title within a title should be styled according to the guidelines in section 1.2.4 of the MLA Handbook, regardless of how a title within a title is styled in the source. For example, the title of an essay about Gone with the Wind is styled in EBSCOHost as follows: Since Gone with the Wind is the . . .
Published 3 October 2018
No. Note that there are many languages in the world that do not have an italic font—Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Armenian, for example. Arabic sometimes uses a typeface that slants to the left instead of to the right. Given the complexity and specificity of historical, cultural, linguistic, and printing practices throughout the world, a writer should not . . .
Published 19 September 2018
If the title of an essay consists solely of the title of a work normally styled in italics, the title of the work should be both italicized and enclosed in quotation marks: In the essay “The Portrait of a Lady,” about Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady, the author provides a detailed character study of . . .
Published 21 August 2018
In an index or sortable list of titles, MLA style follows the The Chicago Manual of Style, which recommends placing initial articles at the end of the full title (16.51). A Tale of Two Cities would appear as Tale of Two Cities, A. Note that titles in indexes do not include subtitles unless they are “essential for identification” (16.55). If . . .
Published 24 July 2018
Yes. If a title ends with a punctuation mark, include the mark: The Band Perry opened their set with the song “Done.,” the second track on their album Pioneer. For examples of titles ending in punctuation marks other than a period, see our previous post.
Published 28 June 2018
To distinguish between different dictionary entries for the same term, follow the principle in our previous post on distinguishing between works with the same title: provide additional details in your parenthetical citation, usually the first unique piece of information in your works-cited-list entries. For example, in the following works-cited-list entries for emoticon, the information in the . . .
Published 30 May 2018
The spelling of a title should almost never be corrected, especially by students, even when the title seems to include an error. Sometimes the “error” is intended, as for the Stephen King novel and movie Pet Sematary, or may be otherwise purposefully made, however ill advised, as for the movie Two Weeks Notice. But sometimes an . . .
Published 23 May 2018
If you are citing a work that has been published with a new title, list the title of the version you are citing in your works-cited-list entry. If it is important for your reader to know the original title, provide the information in an endnote or in your prose.
Published 2 May 2018
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