Up until a few decades ago, writers had two choices: write in longhand or use a typewriter. Typewriters had one font. The characters were one size only. If you wanted to cut and paste, you needed scissors and adhesive tape.<\/p>\n
Writing in italics was all but impossible, except for professional printing companies.<\/p>\n
Thanks to today’s computer keyboards, we now have access to italics. So we need a sensible plan for when to use them and when to use quotation marks. Here is a formula we recommend: Put the title of an entire composition in italics. Put the title of a short work\u2014one that is or could be part of a larger undertaking\u2014in quotation marks.<\/p>\n
By \u201ccomposition\u201d we mean a creative, journalistic, or scholarly enterprise that is whole, complex, a thing unto itself. This includes books, movies, plays, TV shows, newspapers, magazines, websites, music albums, operas, musical theater, paintings, sculptures, and other works of art.<\/p>\n
The following sentence illustrates the principle: Richard Burton performed the song \u201cCamelot\u201d in the 1960 Broadway musical Camelot<\/em>. Although the word is the same, \u201cCamelot\u201d the song takes quotation marks because it’s part of a larger work\u2014namely, a full-length show called Camelot<\/em>.<\/p>\n Italics are also widely used with names of ships, trains, and planes, e.g., the Titanic<\/em>, the 20th Century Limited<\/em>, the Spirit of St. Louis<\/em>. (Note: with ships, do not italicize prefixes such as USS or HMS.)<\/p>\n Quotation marks are customary for components, such as chapter titles in a book, individual episodes of a TV series, songs on a music album, and titles of articles or essays in print or online.<\/p>\n Titles of plays, long and short, are generally italicized. Titles of poems and shorter works of fiction are generally in quotation marks. Long poems, short films, and the extended stories known as \u201cnovellas\u201d are a gray area; some people italicize the titles, others put them in quotation marks.<\/p>\n You won’t go wrong with this policy: For a full-blown composition, put the title in italics. For something smaller and less ambitious, e.g., a short story as opposed to a sprawling novel, put the title in quotation marks. That’s the long and the short of it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Pop quiz<\/strong> 1. Elvis Presley sang Love Me Tender in the movie Love Me Tender. <\/p>\n Pop quiz answers<\/strong> Up until a few decades ago, writers had two choices: write in longhand or use a typewriter. Typewriters had one font. The characters were one size only. If you wanted to cut and paste, you needed scissors and adhesive tape. Writing in italics was all but impossible, except for professional printing companies. Thanks to today’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotation-marks"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nPlace italics and quotation marks where they should go.<\/p>\n
\n2. Chapter 4 of Beautiful Ruins is called The Smile of Heaven.
\n3. Who sang God Save the Queen on the HMS Bounty?<\/p>\n
\n1. Elvis Presley sang \u201cLove Me Tender\u201d in the movie Love Me Tender<\/em>.
\n2. Chapter 4 of Beautiful Ruins<\/em> is called \u201cThe Smile of Heaven.\u201d
\n3. Who sang \u201cGod Save the Queen\u201d on the HMS Bounty<\/em>? (no points if you italicized HMS)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"