Capital letters or not?

Question

This is a question about writing a heading.

For example, if I create the title of a web page such as, 'Why Is this Page Important?' ...

does each word need to be in a capital letter? I heard somewhere that propositions and conjunctions always stay as lower case in headings; only the remainder of the caption should be in capital letters.

Thanks,
Cup Cake.

AlpheccaStars · Accepted Answer

Cup cakedoes each word need to be in a capital letter?

This style has a name. It is called "title case."
Rules for title case capitalization are in various style guides. Here is an example from the APA style guide:

Capitalize the first word of the title/heading and of any subtitle/subheading;
Capitalize all “major” words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns) in the title/heading, including the second part of hyphenated major words (e.g., Self-Report not Self-report); and
Capitalize all words of four letters or more.

This boils down to using lowercase only for “minor” words of three letters or fewer, namely, for conjunctions (words like and, or, nor, and but), articles (the words a, an, and the), and prepositions (words like as, at, by, for, in, of, on, per, and to), as long as they aren’t the first word in a title or subtitle.

Cup cake · Answer

Thanks AlpheccaStars.
Much appreciated.

Capital letters or not?

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Related Questions